Q&A: How Data Intelligence Drives Student Success at Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education

When I started in 2018, we were spending way more than we took in from state and tuition-based revenue. We realized that our smaller schools were going to have to substantially compress their program arrays. But that breadth is important. Opportunities for majors, minors and degrees are important not just for students who want and need them, those communities rely on them for their next generation of everything from business to healthcare and teaching. If you’re looking at a school that once had 80 or 90 programs, and it’s on a path to contract to 30, that’s absolutely devastating for students and their communities.

Our driving motivation behind shared services and integration was to gain financial stability systemwide and sustain opportunity for all of our students. Our schools can now maintain 90 to 100 programs because they’re part of and accountable to this larger entity.

Our five-year integration plans started implementation with students admitted in fall 2022, so we’re accepting our third cohort of students this fall. We now have the baseline processes, technologies and policies established. The core is largely done. We’ve taken all of these separate ways of doing things and brought them together. We’re now determining how we work together and who we are. Culturally, we’re still evolving.

EDTECH: There are a lot of differences from campus to campus, but also from IT department to IT department. How was that aspect of the integration managed?

GREENSTEIN: On the technology side, we did a lot of things right. There was a foundational planning principle and process that happened before the board of governors voted to integrate in July 2021. We created 29 working groups, one focused on academic and student supports, one on IT, etc. They all had a specific charge with timelines and deliverables.

First, they determined what had to be in place on day one, when students show up. What needs to work on that day? We called that our critical path to day one.

We also determined our long-range measurable goals and the leading indicators that all of the schools would be looking at to see whether they were on track. We had a system-level technology group, so we had to look at both system and regional technology trajectories.

You can imagine, from a technology perspective, that a boatload of things have to be up and working on day one, starting with the registrar functions, financial aid, class enrollment, the student information system and all of the things that links into. These folks were on a fast track. It was the most professionally managed project I have ever seen. A lot of people did a lot of hard work, and they nailed it.

EDTECH: Did you have an opportunity to refresh and modernize more efficiently because you were starting almost from scratch?

GREENSTEIN: In 2020, there was a lot of one-time money that many universities and colleges poured into basic operations, and now that money is gone, you’re seeing a lot of closures throughout the country. We used some of it to stand up operations, but most of it went toward this redesign, so it was an accelerant.

We were in the fortunate position to be able to innovate and invest in IT and infrastructure. When you’re throwing all of the cards up into the air, you can design for meta outcomes, and that’s what was happening.

We were also migrating the entire system to a single, cloud-based Ellucian Banner platform, which all of our universities are now on, and that enables program sharing. Our integrated universities were the first out of the gate on that, and now they’ve used it to blend what were once three separate curricula.

EDTECH: Now that you’ve laid the foundations for governance and analysis, can you highlight any early successes? What have you been looking at, and what’s next?

GREENSTEIN: We now have this data-driven culture and these vast data resources, and we can soon provide students with some powerful and innovative tools to plan their educations and careers. Students will have more information to help them decide what courses to take, the average time to complete a degree, the projected costs and more.

I was just in touch with Slippery Rock University, and it has had some tremendous growth in student persistence, particularly among low-income students and students of color. Indiana University of Pennsylvania has shown tremendous improvements, and you can now see the fruits of its labors. Things go slow, and sometimes they dip, but then there’s that hockey stick trajectory that you dream about and hope for, and it seems to be beginning to happen.

EDTECH: What tough decisions did you have to make?

GREENSTEIN: Integrating from 14 to 10 universities was driven by the fact that PASSHE didn’t want to create education deserts. The financial impacts are huge. The question became, how do we sustain affordable, viable instructional activity in support of students and their communities? We’re only a couple of years in, and there’s a lot more to do, but that remains our objective.

We made a major shift as part of our overall system redesign, which had two goals: The short-term goal was to stabilize the system financially; the long-term goal was to produce more credentialed adults within the state of Pennsylvania. Many of today’s jobs require some postsecondary education, which about half of adults in the U.S. have. Because we’re a system of public, state-owned universities, we play a big part in that.

To do that, we engineered a fundamental shift in our governance, away from a compliance-driven, centralized approach to vertical accountabilities, where the board said, “These are our priorities: student success and financial sustainability,” and they identified those specific priorities, their measurements and board-approved metrics. There aren’t that many of them. But then we asked our university presidents, “What are you going to do to advance those priorities, and how will presidents work together with the chancellor to support progress and hold each other accountable for it?” In fact, I think of the presidents as partners in the design and execution of our system strategies. The horizontal accountabilities between them —between their universities — and their work together as a kind of networked improvement community are fundamental parts of the whole accountability structure. That’s now baked into our fabric.

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That has contributed as much or even more to the system’s performance improvements than the more traditional vertical accountabilities that run between the universities and the board, which builds a variety of incentives and, frankly, disincentives that drive performance toward those universal, local goals.

There’s always more to do on financial stewardship and stabilization, of course, while we’re on that, but I think what’s so exciting is that we are in a position now to accelerate into and invest in that second, longer-term part of the redesign strategy, which is focused on credentialing and productivity. That’s exciting.

If you had said to me in 2018, “In order to get to that aspect, you’re going to have to spend a boatload of time on foundational drains and toilets, fixing a bunch of stuff,” I probably wouldn’t have come here as chancellor. Rebuilding the foundation is not sexy, but you’ve got to go slow in order to go fast. If you don’t have the fundamental things in place — governance, accountability, mechanisms that drive and support aligned action, the technology infrastructure, the command of your data — anything you do on the innovation, credentialing or productivity side is just going to be one little boutique thing. To do it enterprisewide, in a manner that is actually able to have impact, that’s exciting. And we’re seeing results.