Understanding Who Your Department Serves
As Student Affairs pushes forward with Adapting to Student Needs (ASN), practitioners will increasingly be called upon to identify how their department’s goals, objectives, and initiatives relate to the strategic plan. Many Student Affairs departments have already been collecting data that evaluates their goals, learning outcomes, and program effectiveness for the students they serve. Soon, directors will be asked to complete a catalog of which departmental data sources they are currently using to assess internal goals and objectives. For many departments, data sources might include program evaluation surveys, utilization numbers, or student assessments.
Demographic & Academic Student Data
One reliable but sometimes overlooked data source that many SA departments can utilize to better articulate their own goals and initiatives is the demographic background and academic experiences of the students they serve. Drawing from Registrar and Admissions forms, the University of Utah tracks and catalogs demographic and academic data for all credit-seeking students at the institution.
An excel spreadsheet or tableau dashboard featuring these demographic and academic data can bolster a department’s efforts to better account for their specific population of students they are serving day-in and day-out.
Ultimately, these data are very helpful to SA Departments that work with specific student populations because they can be used to answer questions such as:
- Which students are you serving or not serving?
- Which academic colleges and programs are your student population affiliated with?
- What is the graduation and persistence rate for your student population?
Steps Your Department Can Take to Acquire Demographic & Academic Student Data
The Department of Assessment & Analytics (A&A), acting as the data steward on behalf
of Student Affairs, can help locate and provide demographics and academic student
data for internal processes and decision-making. Specifically, A&A will utilize the
Student Data Warehouse (UU Internal Servers) to pull all data for this project.
In order to initiate the process of acquiring these data for your department, contact assessment@sa.utah.edu. The A&A project manager will follow-up with several steps to better understand the specific goals and timeline for your project, including:
- Cataloging any demographics and academic data your department currently possesses, in efforts to not duplicate work and clarify what is missing.
- Identifying specific information that your department wants to explore (i.e., transfer rate, graduation rate, etc.).
- Understanding any overarching decisions or insights this data will contribute to.
- Setting a timeline for delivering all major milestones for the project.
- Deciding on a medium for delivering the data (i.e., Excel spreadsheet, Tableau dashboard, PDF report).
Example of this Data in Action: The Veteran Support Center
that the Veteran Support Center (VSC) recently gathered demographics and academic-related data to better understand the students they serve. In the fall of 2022, members of the VSC reached out to A&A to gather deeper insight into veteran students’ demographics, transfer rates, and graduation rates. A handful of follow-up meetings were established to identify what information the VSC currently possessed and how it overlapped with data that A&A was able to locate in the Student Data Warehouse.
Ultimately, the VSC received a comprehensive Excel spreadsheet with internal data showing a breakdown of veteran students’ gender and race identity, transfer student status, and academic college/program enrollment numbers. Additionally, A&A is currently working with the Office of Institutional Research to identify graduation and persistence rates for veteran students over the last five years. Currently, information from this project is helping the VSC identify a clearer picture of the types of students they should be recruiting to their events, the academic colleges they should be partnering with, and the types of academic and social resources they should be providing to their student population.