Dr. Mihir Chand, director of Institutional effectiveness, and Dr. Delfina Wilson, vice president of student affairs, both at Kansas City Kansas Community College, have been accepted into Cohort 1 of the Strategic Data Project for Career and Technical Education Fellowship.
The program is operated through the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.
The Strategic Data Project (SDP) is an initiative of the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard. The primary focus of this fellowship is to significantly improve student success by directing the fellows to develop strategic policies, improve institutional abilities for quality decision making and build internal capacities to critically understand institutional characteristics and supporting evidence-based decisions. The fellows will strengthen the impact of postsecondary career and technical education programs to help students thrive in their career, workforce and life.
During the fellowship and after, Chand and Wilson hope to evaluate and monitor each progressive phase of a student’s experience at KCKCC. They are interested in substantially improving rates of student engagement, progression and completion not just at the front-end of their academic career, but throughout and after they graduate.
KCKCC foresees expanding the reforms beyond the traditional cohorts and working to develop intentional programmatic components, instilling a culture of evidence and measuring specific student success metrics for all students, according to a spokesman.
“To know we are one of possibly four cohorts selected nationally is a humbling experience,” Chand and Wilson said in a news release. “This opportunity confirms our vow to be an institution that is data informed and driven. Beyond a recognition, this engagement sets the tone for the KCKCC campus to think, process and act on data constructively, to strategize and reintegrate data into strategic planning, program review, and all informed data models to increase quality of our services, increase performance metrics and overall cohesiveness in our efforts. All, in alignment to increase student success equitably.”
The fellowship will enable Wilson and Chand to organize data purposefully to unveil the student success metrics beyond the cohort levels. During and after the fellowship, both intend to understand the academic, operational and financial health of the institution. In addition, both fellows acknowledge that understanding student needs more expeditiously allows intervention at regular intervals.
“KCKCC strongly believes and commits to using data to understand the success measures, identifying the barriers to success and developing meaningful interventions. The focus now at KCKCC is to increase functional abilities, streamline processes and inform and transform organizational effectiveness,” they stated in the news release. “We wish to extend our sincere gratitude to KCKCC President Dr. (Greg) Mosier for his support and encouragement. Our contributions, we hope, will help support his vision and strategic focus for KCKCC on improving the quality of academic services to truly support the mission statement of ‘be a national leader in academic excellence and partner of choice in the communities we serve.’”
To learn more about the Strategic Data Project for Career and Technical Education Fellowship, visit https://sdp.cepr.harvard.edu/fellowship-cte.
- From Kelly Rogge, KCKCC public relations manager