How to use data benchmarking to achieve results in higher education
Data plays a vital role in every step of the change management process. It’s foundational for all organizational change and informed decision-making, but equally, it has the potential to engage, inspire, and challenge leadership to view the impact of these changes from multiple perspectives.
In higher education, in particular, benchmarking data supports leaders in defining the institutions they are similar to, and those they aspire to become. Originally developed in the early 1980s by the Xerox Corporation, benchmarking was quickly adopted by colleges and universities to understand and address operational inefficiencies, especially in the face of declining enrollment numbers and funding shortages.
In today’s resource-constrained climate, it provides leaders with a standard to measure against and a way to identify effective practices in place at comparative institutions. A well-done study can also establish context for your desired change and help overcome resistance by winning the support of senior leadership.
Change does not occur in a vacuum, as they say, so benchmarking can be a valuable tool for any leadership toolbox when you are called upon to create change. It can also serve as the key to transforming your institution or organization into a model of innovation and service excellence.
Using data benchmarking to achieve results
To ensure your benchmarking exercise produces the intended results, there are several key steps to follow. Before devising your strategy, start by identifying your purpose and end goal.
Step 1: Identify your benchmarking goal
Common purposes for higher education benchmarking include:
Identifying best practices
Informing organizational design
Enacting policy changes
Improving processes or procedures
Setting key metrics
Differentiating programs
Start with identifying the key question or hypothesis that will guide your research.
Step 2: Choose the most relevant data points
Choosing the right criteria for your data is paramount. Depending on your established goal, your data criteria could include:
Rankings
Student enrollment
Employee headcount
Ratios
Expenditures
Endowments
Private or public status
Research status
Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education posted a data visualization tool, built from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Ipeds) dataset, showing who your institution considers a peer, as well as the institutions that consider you a peer. It’s subjective – due to institutions self-selecting their peers – but it’s a valuable tool to accessing data about comparable institutions.
The more refined your criteria, the better your benchmark set will be. A typical dataset should be no more than 10-12 institutions. Too many benchmarks can make it challenging to distill the key highlights that will inform your decision-making.
Another important framing technique is to consider whether you want to compare your institution to peers or institutions you aspire to become. While peer comparisons assist you with aligning your institution to the best practices of a similar organization, aspirational benchmarks inspire movement towards a future state. For a recent project, we chose to use “inspirational” benchmarks that were intended to spark ideas for growth in specific areas.
No matter how you define the categories, it’s important to be clear and consistent in how you describe your benchmarks and why you chose them.
Step 3: Quantify, qualify, and visualize benchmarking data
After you have chosen your set of benchmark institutions, compare and contrast your data to glean key insights for your decision-making process. We’ve found a number of ways to quantify, qualify, and visualize the benchmarking data.
Quantifying data
First, capturing quantifiable data during benchmarking can take many forms. Many times, it is easiest to state the number of institutions in your benchmark set that have comparable features. In what ways does your institution align with or diverge from your benchmarks? A deeper dive into the available data can confirm that you are engaged in best practices or it can help to identify areas for improvement.
For example, if nine out of 10 benchmark institutions are offering a particular service you’re not, it could be a compelling reason to make an investment in that offering. In the realm of organizational design, it can also be helpful to quantify the number of institutions that pair certain departments together as this can indicate opportunities for synergy and improved operational effectiveness.
Qualifying data
Vital information is shared publicly on institutional websites that can help you measure your college or university against others, but it’s more difficult to measure how effective an organization, service, policy, or key performance metric is without gathering qualitative information.
Scheduling informational interviews with other institutions provides you with a clearer picture of whether the data you’re benchmarking against has been successful or effective. We’ve often found that most contacts are willing to schedule a discussion with you to delve deeper into the inner workings of their organization.
Data visualization
Finally, the proliferation of data visualization tools in higher education speaks to its potential for compelling storytelling, and they’re equally beneficial in making a compelling case for change to internal stakeholders.
Tools like Tableau or Power BI enable you to manage large comparison datasets, build dashboards for data visualization in real time, and present sophisticated visual representations of your dataset. While not everyone has access to these powerful tools, building pivot tables and charts in Excel can be a simple and quick way to visualize your data.
As with any data exercise, it’s important to recognize its challenges or limitations. This process is not an exact science, and you’re often not comparing apples to apples. No two institutions are exactly alike. Environmental factors – such as organizational culture and design, academic mission, endowment size, student body, location, and financial status, to name a few – can make finding a true comparator difficult.
To mitigate these factors, we must return to the original purpose of the benchmarking exercise, which is to inspire and contextualize proposed changes to how things are done. While it has its limitations, the exercise of comparison can foster open mindedness and a willingness to see where change is necessary – and to create a solid foundation for transformation.
Interested in exploring how benchmarking can support your organization, let’s connect.