Texas Universities Chart Public Course Toward Advancing Excellence

Once The University of Texas System chancellor created a Framework for Advancing Excellence, the system of nine universities and six health institutions needed a way to track their progress toward goals that the framework set.

In December, it launched a public, system-wide executive dashboard in a move designed to provide greater transparency and accountability. Over the next 10 months, the offices of Strategic Management and Institutional Studies and Policy Analysis will develop more detailed dashboards to shine a spotlight on specific areas.

"One of the things we want to be able to do with the dashboard is to give an open and transparent view of what we're doing well and what we're having challenges with, and our goals and objectives and how we're tracking on those goals and objectives over time," said Sandy Woodley, the system's vice chancellor for strategic initiatives.

The Web-based analytics will help the system track and measure success against the framework as well as figure out whether it's keeping pace with its goals.

"As the chancellor put together his vision for the future in the framework, we want to make sure that we understand exactly what it means to be successful in that framework."

These accountability systems provide 10 touchstone outcome indicators that map to nine focus areas of the framework and give interested parties an idea of how the system is doing. Those indicators fall into five major areas: student success, faculty, research & technology transfer, healthcare and productivity.

For example, some student success indicators include fall enrollment, degrees awarded, graduation rates, and post-graduation success as measured by employment and/or enrollment in graduate school. Once you click on fall enrollment, it shows academic and health enrollment. By clicking on one of those two, you can track enrollment over the years by institution, then by type of degree, race, gender and enrollment status.

By working with SAS Analytics and Business Intelligence software, The University of Texas System created a place where the public and its leaders can pull information from the dashboard website. Over at least the past year, expert groups worked with high-level leaders from the universities to figure out which major categories and indicators were most important to include.

That work will continue this year as they build out other dashboards as well as institutional and college-level profiles. One of the challenges the system faces includes putting high-quality data into the data warehouse that feeds the dashboard. To do that, the system needs to establish clear definitions so that the data it collects means the same thing at every institution. Improving data will be an ongoing process.   

"You may have lots of data, you may have collected it for many many years, but until it gets some public play, sometimes you don't notice some of the data quality issues that you may have at the institution until the data are actually used," Woodley said.

The other challenge involves collecting data as efficiently as possible from institutions. By pulling data directly from the source, they won't lose time trying to process it, and the data will be more accurate because it will be automated.

Overall, Woodley said the system has received good feedback from the Legislature and regents. And the system leadership is excited to take this accountability system in a different direction than she's seen elsewhere.