Students are the Passion of our Data

When those of us in Academia discuss student success, we often narrowly focus on data points that support our favorite programs and initiatives. We know from experience that grant funding agencies and even our own local budget committees respond better to quantitative data sets rather than to stories of individual students. Logos trumps Pathos at budget time.

For example, speakers at an Achieving the Dream workshop this past winter outlined the dismal record we have in this country of converting developmental education students to college students. Speakers promoting the Carnegie Foundation Statway and Quantway developmental education math curriculum used data to show the disaster:

• Consider, they said, that 60 to 70-percent of our incoming students need developmental math courses.
• But, of those who enter the dev-ed courses, 80-percent never make it out.
• That's 500,000 lost students each year.

If you're selling a new, more effective (again according to student data) math curriculum, this is a powerful argument that demonstrates an overwhelming need for a new model. But is that all student success means? Hoping for a ten or twenty-point gain over two years?

I was asked to report on the Achieving the Dream conference to a college committee this past week, which gave me a reason to review and reflect on notes and handouts, such as the Carnegie material. I, and others from my college, attended dozens of workshops over three and a half days. Each presentation was supported by data showing a problem, the implementation of a new idea to solve that problem, and post-data demonstrating incremental success.

That's all to the good, but what stands out from the conference was not the charts and tables of numbers, but the stories I heard of students helped by colleagues in Achieving the Dream colleges. One of the speakers, a data guy, put it best: "Students are the faces of the data; their stories are data with soul."

As instructors, staff and leadership in community colleges, we know that students feel isolated and doubled over by a seemingly uncaring collegiate system. Students of color told the conference attendees that they felt stupid, intimidated, and out of place in a "white people's college". They didn't believe they belonged in college until someone stepped out from behind a desk and worked with them. One former student, now a college administrator with a Ph.D. behind his name, said his success began with one person who persuaded him, "You are able. You have a right to be here. You can succeed, and I will help you."

Data may get us the dollars to run the programs that buy the desks, but one-on-one student engagement gets us the success. We can't overlook the stories of our students as we count their heads. Certainly, we have to use the data to secure funding to create an "infrastructure of opportunity available to every student," as a speaker said. That is the funding game. But while we work at that, we should never overlook the hopeful faces that the data sometimes hides. Students are the real passion that we, as academics, pursue. If the student is not our passion, then what are we doing here?