Beyond Compliance: Institutional Strategy and Effectiveness with Dr. Tracey Baham

In this episode of UnchartED State, host Susan Seal is joined by Dr. Tracey Baham, Associate Vice President for Institutional Strategy and Effectiveness at Mississippi State University, to unpack the shifting landscape of accreditation, data, and institutional effectiveness in higher education.

As external pressures and evolving standards reshape the field, Dr. Baham offers an inside look at how universities are moving beyond compliance-driven models toward more strategic, mission-centered decision-making. The conversation explores the growing role of data in shaping institutional strategy, the challenges of data literacy, and the risks of relying too heavily on standardized metrics.

Together, they examine the tension between accountability and autonomy, the unintended consequences of performance-based funding, and what it means to measure success in education, both in the short term and across a lifetime. From accreditation reform to the broader purpose of higher education, this episode highlights a critical moment of transformation and asks: how do institutions stay true to what makes them unique while adapting to a rapidly changing environment?

As higher education continues to evolve, this episode challenges listeners to rethink how we define quality, success, and impact, not just through numbers, but through purpose, mission, and meaningful outcomes.

In This Episode:

• The shift from compliance to strategy in institutional effectiveness
• How accreditation is evolving at the federal and national levels
• The growing importance of data literacy in higher education
• Risks of standardization and losing institutional identity
• Performance-based funding and its unintended consequences
• Rethinking how we measure success beyond short-term metrics

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'll tell you what I'm excited about. Okay. I think that there's a lot of process that has been the focus of accreditation and higher education reporting that we're about to let go of. And I'm really excited to see what's about to happen with that. Some of the concern I have is with these shifts, we're moving more toward national standards. And that's going to cause more drift toward similarities. I'm not saying it's happening, it's just a fear that concerns me. If we all have to look like the same type of institution, then we won't have what makes Mississippi State Mississippi State. How are we going to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the SEC if we all have to have the exact same standards?

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Hello everyone and welcome to Uncharted State. I'm Susan Seale. And I wanted to take a minute today and thank our listeners. We've had some really great feedback on our episodes. We hope that it will spark conversation in your own institutions with your colleagues or counterparts at other universities or colleges. And I think it's doing that. And I think uh our episode today, I think, is certainly set up for that uh as well. Other than our guest, we don't normally think of uh accreditation and institutional effectiveness as exciting, except for recently. It's been in the headlines uh a lot lately, uh, debates in different areas, and our guest lives at the intersection of that every day. And so we have Dr. Tracy Bayum with us. Thank you for being here. No, thank you for having me. Uh Dr. Bayham serves as Associate Vice President for Institutional Strategy and Effectiveness and as Mississippi State University's accreditation liaison officer to SACS COC. For those of you who don't know, this is the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. Her office, the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness, is responsible for the data, assessment, and continuous improvement processes that keep Mississippi State accredited, compliant, and strategically informed. In a moment where accreditation is being reimagined at the federal level, Dr. Bayham's work has never been more visible or consequential. Is all that true?

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Of course. It's very true. And I have the data to prove it. Okay, of course you do. We are compliant and relevant in our field. Uh yes, that that absolutely sums up what we're hearing a lot in the news.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Good. So when we say institutional effectiveness, is that a common language that for if we're thinking about universities across the nation, does that mean the same thing to everybody with all institutions, or does it vary some or depending on your role? Or does everybody know this is what we mean?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Well, as a field, the term institutional effectiveness does belong to, it has a discipline, it has uh educational background, theoretical framework, et cetera. But not everybody uses the terminology institutional effectiveness. Uh, institutional effectiveness is more of a SAC COC term. Other regions call it continuous improvement, uh, others call it process improvement, their quality assurance, there are various terms that that connote the same concept of institutional effectiveness. The process itself, the going through and determining whether you're meeting your goals, what your goals are, uh, how you know that you're being successful is the same generally across all of these areas, but it it applies differently to institutions based on their mission. So we, as Mississippi State University, have a mission for teaching research and service. Not every institution has that. We tend to think we do because we're around counterparts that are just like us, but not every institution has all three of those components. So their institutional effectiveness will look different than ours, but they would follow the same general procedure of setting goals and evaluating those.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

So are accreditation bodies a lot different? I mean, is SAC COC a lot different than the ones we see in other parts of the nation, or are they?

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Well, they're they're drifting more to becoming more similar than they used to be. It used to be, but so is industry. It used to be regions were very specific in this is the type of ag, this is the type of technology, these are the type of workers and uh employment opportunities we have in the region that used to be more different than it is now. But now that they've removed the regional constraints on accrediting agencies, it is more uh universal.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

So at at Mississippi State, well, uh let me ask you, is is this true? Because we tend to think about uh institutional effectiveness is about compliance. Is that true? It kind of used to be you think of that, it's compliance, it's that checking a box, making sure we're doing the things that we should do. Yes, we're good. Okay, fine.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Yes, that is absolutely what uh we used to think of when we thought of that, but that's what we used to think of as accreditation also. It's not that case anymore, but it is still lingering in people's memories.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Yeah. It's becoming more strategic. I mean, strategy is in your title.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

In the title, yes, it's it's more strategic as in it uh is supposed to be uh related to the institution itself. So, what what does institutional effectiveness mean for Mississippi State rather than higher education in general or or a public large public research institution in the Southeast? It's more what is important to Mississippi State. And and we have students just like all these other institutions, and and they have similar missions to us, but we have uniqueness or distinctions for Mississippi State that these other institutions don't have. And how we interpret those data, that's where the strategy comes in. Uh data are just numbers on a page or uh context on a page, but they need a story and they need uh to be interpreted in a way that it's useful to the institution. That's where the strategy comes in.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

So how long have you been in that position?

SPEAKER_01 6:13

In the position that I'm I'm I've worked in institutional effectiveness for 20-something years. I won't count that. I don't like to know how how long I've been I've been in the field closer to retirement than the beginning of my my career. But I have been in this role since the pandemic, since roughly 2020. So uh that's the transition into previously I was in institutional effectiveness alone, and now I'm over at the office that integrates institutional effectiveness and research.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

I often say that positions tend to take on the personality, the skills of the person in them. And I I think that happened when you moved into that position because you had a lot of experience with it. And so it seemed like that role changed. Has it changed since you took over? I mean, has it become more strategic? Are there areas that, hey, let's move it in this way? And it can be a part of the things that we're wanting to do and how we can do those as opposed to, okay, we're good, check.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

I absolutely I do believe it's become more strategic since um even a change in leadership with our our provost, Dr. Shaw, uh, has asked for it to become more strategic. And and the my office has responded to to that call, uh, or at least we attempt to, we're trying to uh move us in that direction, away from process and more toward meaning. What is the meaning of the data we're collecting? How could we use it in a way to improve ourselves? Uh, I know we see it in enrollment. We we see it with strategic enrollment. I know we see it with uh student success and the in the call. We can count students all day long, but how you count them and who you count and when you count is part of the strategy that that comes into how this role fits into the greater plan for uh institutional effectiveness.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

How much of what dictates how we do some of those things? How much of that is state from our institutions of higher learning? And how much is that is federal?

SPEAKER_01 8:16

It is more state than federal. Uh it is absolutely a Mississippi, who we count and how we do our enrollment is is more so the federal changes, and we'll we'll talk about some of those in a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

That's more on just the accreditation bodies and how we're kind of moving.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Well, it to me that what the federal government is is focusing on is what happens after you leave college. So not only are you enrolling students, but are you leaving them better off than they were if they had never gone to college at all? Uh that that's more of that focus, whereas our state's looking at are we serving the state and are we meeting the needs of the state's constituents?

SPEAKER_00 8:55

Yeah. So we're we're in the South. Uh and if you're not sure about that, you can at least tell from my accent uh that we are, uh, and the Bible Belt, uh traditionally called the Bible Belt. And I have said before that, you know, people can go to the Bible or to the whatever their holy text, sacred text is, and you can learn from it and live your life based on that. Quite often we go to our holy text to find a passage of scripture that will support what we want, whether we take it out of context or not. There is a passage that says this, so that's what it means. Data can be the same way. Absolutely. We can we can go to it to justify whatever it is that we are trying to justify, or we can use it as a guide to help us make decisions. So, how do we distinguish between the two and and how are we using it as a decision-making tool?

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Well, I would say that some of what you're you're talking about is using data as a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way, is not so much an internal pressure, it's more of an external pressure. So usually somebody will pick up, because as I mentioned before, data or numbers on a page or narrative on a page without without context, and they will draw their own conclusions unless we provide appropriate conclusions for them. And often we have to react to those conclusions that have been made. But for us, setting our goals the way that it matters to our president, to our provost, to our senior leaders, to deans, to directors, uh, setting those goals is as important, if not more so, in whether how we interpret those data. So if the if our goals are set up in a way that we can capture data in a useful, appropriate way, then your data are likely to be useful and informative and and follow those decisions. But sometimes what happens is we don't, we don't really know where we're headed. We know we want to go down a path, but we don't know exactly what it looks like. And so you're just trying to see what what do these data look like? How are we, how are we going to gather information? And that's the part that we we need to be intentional in uh setting which paths we're going down and which data are gonna inform whether we're we're we chose the the correct path or not.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Do we have everybody who needs access to the data? How how are we doing from that standpoint? I know in the past, you know, we've talked about having more dashboards and making it more accessible and those kind of things. How do you feel like where we are at Mississippi State, but then also maybe what you're seeing on from our counterparts and friends?

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Well, I feel like we are in an era of there's more data than ever in in these this regard. It's more of a what is going to be useful and what what is going what is going to help. Our regulatory requirements have really grown and we have provided more data. And and even just after this last, I know we're going to get to the federal pieces, but even after some of these latest federal changes, we've had even more reporting and even more data put out in the public. I don't think people know what they're looking at and what to do with it. And so there's a data literacy piece that that comes with it, more so, if not if not more important than the availability, but do we know what we're looking at and how we can how we can leverage those data appropriately?

SPEAKER_00 12:17

So internally, do we know what we're looking at sometimes? I mean, is that I think it's the same thing with you know financial statements. There's the you knowing how to put the financial statements together, which our accounting and those people know how to do, but then as managers, what does the financial statement mean? How can we make decisions? And I say that because I was in private industry, and that was something that I had to learn early on. Okay, what is this telling me? Do those of us or and I think really at every level of an institution, people need to be able to understand that. How do we increase that data literacy piece? And then there's the stakeholder side. There's the one thing that internally do we know what we're looking at in order to make decisions, but then also when things get thrown in the news completely out of context, you know, how do we help the stakeholder side as well?

SPEAKER_01 13:09

That happens a lot with terminology. People hear the term graduation rate. Well, graduation rate applies to a certain subsection of the population so that it can be comparable to all of the other institutions and then by that very nature excludes other populations. And for instance, graduation rates do not apply to transfer students. You would use a different term, you would call it completion rate, but we don't want to get wrapped around the axle over semantics and because that that's not fun to say, well, go to the dictionary and and see what it says. So there's there's some of that. Then there's you're just trying to trick me. And and people love to read your list of definitions before they they look at your dashboards. Uh so there's that's part of what goes in this, the whole conversation is helping people understand what question they're asking. And when they talk with us, it's easier for us to say, oh, well, uh, when you say graduation rate, we're gonna look at this, and this is who we're talking about, and this is what these numbers look like. But when it's self-serve and go to our dashboards and look at it, it's harder to get in front of that. And uh that happens a lot with the public as well. Uh they hear the term graduation rate, but they may or may not understand who all is included in that in that calculation.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Well, and we've talked about with other parts of the university, we have our own language. And and from a recruiting standpoint, simple things that you know, people don't understand what graduation rate is because we use it in a different way. Right. Uh we were joking the other day about how students quite often don't know what college they're in. If you ask them, so what's your college? And we're thinking college of business, college of professional continuing studies, college of engineering, they go, Mississippi State. I mean, they don't know, you know, and that's a very simple thing, you know, and even particularly when we're talking about first generation students of understanding graduate and undergraduate and things that are just very common for us. And so when you get into things like the terminology you're talking about, that's even next level for the public to understand.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Yes. Yes. And some of it, like like we were saying, you don't want to get wrapped up on semantics and and and correcting, but then at the same token, people draw conclusions based on that, and they need to know that it it applies in some areas and not not others. Uh that's just hard to communicate in in a helpful way without making it sound like you're wrong. You drew the wrong conclusion.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

The Association of Institutional Research recently described this moment in time of higher ed as a structural inflection point for higher ed. What does that kind of mean to you?

SPEAKER_01 15:53

Well, to me, it means we are inundated with more regulations. We have a constant barrage of data requests coming in. And we can't do as much with those data. And you have to grow your staff just to respond to these regulations. Well, you can't just pick anybody straight out of high school or out of college. They've got to know more about what the field means and what what do these terms mean. And they have that that learning process. And so it's just hard to respond to all of these requests while also being strategic and and maintaining what's important to the institution and how to support them and and not get buried in all the regulatory procedures that are happening that are we're facing right now.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

Yeah, it's hard to think about strategy when you're just like, okay, I gotta answer this and I gotta when you're being responsive. And you have to be responsive because things changed, they're different today than they were yesterday.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

And in in the absence of information, people will find a way to fill that void. And it may not be the way you would hope that they would find that information.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

I worked for a guy in in Atlanta who was a kind of a mentor for me, and he used to say all the time, if people don't know, they're going to guess. And most of the time they're gonna guess wrong. And I mean, that was his thing about being transparent with things because they're they're gonna make up their story. And if you don't tell them what the truth is, it their information's gonna be just wrong.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Or if they go to one of these reputation entities that who knows where they got their data, uh how how they drew those conclusions, they may rely on those sources and uh choose their information that way.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

But now we have AI, so we we we can know all things, right? It all comes down to the question, right? It's a good question, then you can get good data sometimes, or unless it hallucinates. So yeah. So in in the past, uh accreditation has kind of been the gateway to federal financial aid. Yes, and it really hasn't changed a lot in the last 75 years or so, but right now we're under a a lot of pressure. Some of the changes that we're talking about, the federal things, um, it seems like daily. Where all is that coming from? The the criticisms that we're seeing in higher ed, the people don't trust. I mean, you you're talking about, you know, the the message that's out there, but there's questions and uh and we've talked about on here people not trusting higher ed, which used to be one of the top, as I said, pharmacists and educators were the, you know, the top people we trusted. Is is any of it fair? Is it a fair criticism?

SPEAKER_01 18:32

Yeah, I've some of it, some of it is. Uh, you know, when when I started in accreditation, the standards for accreditation were were must statements, and they were very specific. You had to have this number of ratio for tenure track faculty, and you had to have this number of uh students who were graduating at this particular moment in time. And that there's some of that has relaxed and is in the process of relaxing even further. But I think we in higher education have, and and this this is just my opinion. I feel that that we have blamed our accreditors for a number of things that we should have been doing anyway. And there's some of this, we should have goals. We should be measuring whether they're effective or not. But we've always said, well, you have to do it because sexy of C tells us we have to. That's just part of our accreditation. And and we've done some of that to ourselves, and that is part of Turns out it's just a good idea to do. Right. And so now, you know, in response, if accreditation starts pulling back, then we're going to have to do it and we'll have to be our own bad guys. And like you said, it turns out it's probably just a good idea that we should, we should be doing these things and we won't have that. What I do appreciate about where we are in this moment with accreditation and what is happening is the the peer evaluation piece is so subjective. Quality is a is in the eye of the beholder. And I do appreciate that the changes that are happening in this space are putting the quality evaluation back on the institutions themselves and not on our peers. So instead of us going to a school in North Carolina or in Georgia and saying, well, this is how we do it. This is what we think you should do. It's more of a explain to me how this is important to you and why this is helping you make the institution a better place. And oh, how interesting. I wonder if we could try that back at our institution and more of a conversation now than it used to be with all the thou shouts and the uh the certain metrics that you were trying to hit in a compliance situation. So I don't know how much of that is out in the public. That that's the shift and that's what's currently happening because there are still people who have uh, you know, our new president of SAC COC, uh Dr. Stephen Pruitt, he's talking about law versus lore. He has a whole series of law versus lore of things that used to be in the SAC COC principles that are no longer there, but people have it in their memory. And it's uh been a learning process to unlearn some of those parameters. And I don't think that's that's trickled down past accreditation liaisons yet.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

I was reading about the accreditation, innovation, and modernization committee and the uh Department of Education. And I know there's other critical changes that are taking place. Uh what are some of the things that kind of keep you up at night thinking about whether it's good or bad? You know, sometimes I stay up thinking about fun, innovative things, and other times I'm sweating and fretting. Um I'll tell you what I'm excited about.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Okay. I think that there's a lot of process that has been the focus of accreditation and higher education reporting that we're about to let go of. And I'm very excited about that. There's a lot of what feels like busy work that we have to do because we don't know how to be able to meet these standards or demonstration. Our effectiveness otherwise. And I'm really excited to see what's about to happen with that. Some of the concern I have is in the United States, we've always had a lot of individualized missions at these institutions. That's why we have so many more institutions of higher education than many of our European and other nationalities have for their education, higher education system. But we with these shifts, we're moving more toward national standards than we ever have in, well, in my recent memory. And that's going to cause more closures, mergers, more drift toward similarities. And we we may see, and that's a fear that I have. I'm not saying it's happening, it's just a fear of something that that concerns me, that if we all have to look like the same type of institution, then we won't have what makes Mississippi State Mississippi State. How are we going to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the SEC if we all have to have the exact same standards? Um, I'm a little worried about that.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

That's and our populations are different. They are. I mean, even within our state, some of our major universities serve different populations.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Absolutely. And yeah, I've one of the things that has inspired me the most about President Keenum is when he talks about solving world hunger. And that is an important mission to him. And it excites me, it excites his audience. And when we have an individualized mission, then we can graduate students with the intent of addressing world hunger. And if we are too centralized and we're too focused on standards, we might lose sight of that, that ability to be able to pick some important topics that are important to our leadership, that uh we might miss that opportunity. If we're too fixated on, well, it has to meet this standard and go this way. And that's a concern that I have that uh without the peer review piece and the accreditation piece that asks us, it always starts with what is your mission? What is your what is your purpose? What is your goal? And that's not what I see when I see you have to hit this earnings premium and you have to hit this graduation rate, and you've got to complete so many students and have this debt ratio uh loses some of that perspective.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Well, it's kind of the equivalent of of teaching to the test. Right. If you're only trying to do the things that are gonna be on the test, you're missing some real opportunities to to do great work or to learn great things or or whatever. SACCOC made some changes at the 2025. It did. Is that some of the things you're talking about? Some of it, absolutely. Yeah. It's creating more helping things become faster in how we move, which is not something higher ed stuff.

SPEAKER_01 24:57

I told my boss I felt like I got a race when I saw some of that process fall by the wayside. It it was getting to a place and the intentions were good. The intentions were that we were looking at program quality and that we were intentionally designing programs that would serve students. But what was happening was people didn't know what to evaluate, and they're therefore they supplanted their own interpretation of what quality is. And we were having to answer justifications for things that we really shouldn't have had to. They just didn't understand us in our state. And then and it became a place where it was not so much about the program quality, but did we write a good enough narrative that explained who we are and what we're trying to do? And that's ultimately, we were spending more time doing that than we were getting these programs out the door and um educating students to do the things that are important to Mississippi State University.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

So shifting just a little bit, performance-based funding, where state appropriations are tied to those specific outcomes. Yeah, and we've we've been talking about that for years. I it's been, I don't know, 15, 16 years or so since I was at the vet school. And I remember us talking about it then, about uh the merit-based and those kind of things. And it sounds good. It sounds like, well, of course you would fund the things that are showing the outcomes. But what are some of the unintended consequences with that as well?

SPEAKER_01 26:28

Some of it is if you are rewarding the strengths, then are you supporting the weaknesses also? Are we giving enough resources to those who need it to make improvements? If we're saying this is important as a state and this whatever metric it is is falling behind, then that the question is, do you need more funding to bring that up and make it a strength? Or do you reward the people who were doing it well? Because it's if it's a zero sum game, there's finite resources. Do you have money to give to the people who are doing it well and are going to spend it well, or do we need to spend that money to help improve the people who miss the mark or are not as high at the at the as other institutions? And that's part of what what we're seeing with performance funding is we're going to find a way to not we as at Mississippi State, but in general, the tendency is to find a way to get the money, to have those resources. So you may focus more on what the metric is saying to your point about teaching the test, and not as much on feeding world hunger or uh eradicating diseases or whatever the mission of the institution is, because it we are now incentivized to meet this funding target rather than the mission of the institution. Truly solve some problems. Right. Right, right, which are probably not measurable. Yeah. At least not immediately, not in the short term.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

Well, you know, we've talked about it from a marketing standpoint of being able to measure everything. Okay, you know, looking at the ROI. But there's some things that aren't as measurable, but it doesn't mean that they're not effective. Right. So do we just stop doing everything that's not precisely measurable? I think if we do, then we're gonna we're gonna miss some really good things.

SPEAKER_01 28:19

Well, some of it is not everything in your world, maybe a little bit different than marketing. Maybe not everything that is measurable is numerical, and that's part of the other problem, is we we keep trying to find a numerical answer to some of these things. And it may not be a number, it may be narrative or context or a story or uh something that that mat a justification that matters in a way that can't be depicted in a spreadsheet.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Yeah, more qualitative than, yeah. Right. We've talked about graduation rates and those type of measures. And a lot of times that that accountability and those outcomes that we're looking at, they seem more short-term. And what universities do and the impact that education has is over a lifetime. I mean, there's some pretty robust research that shows how education changes lives. Uh, some of that is directly related to how much money somebody makes over their lifetime. Right. But then there's other other benefits as well. Are are we running the risk of with some of the things that we've talked about with uh expectations from federal or state, that we're focusing so much of our accountability on the short term? Or are we are are we looking at some of the longer term things, or is so many of the data points that you're looking at, you know, six months after graduation or we we have some of the longitudinal salary.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

Uh the problem is the farther you get away from completion, the less direct the tie is to the institution itself. So once a student leaves here, their education doesn't end. They will continue to grow. That's the whole premise of why you would get a degree that there you can't know everything that you're gonna need to know by the time you graduate college. Uh, so it the the more life experience a student has, the less directly tied it can be back to the institution itself. And that's part of why it gets harder going forward. It also is a lot of pressure on institutions for the economy of a state or of a of an area. So uh if if an institution is being tied to its success being tied to whether a student is getting a job that that pays a living wage, some of that is the industry ready for the inst the students that the the institution has produced. But at the same token, does that then mean to your point, do we need to be looking at how entrepreneurial students are, how uh adventurous they are, if this is a field that they're really interested in and it's not available here, how do we how do we track that to your point? How do we find what what it is that's going to matter to them? And you know, some of it is perhaps those are the measures that need to be included beyond earnings premiums. Maybe we do need to know how many graduates are on some form of social welfare or are incarcerated or or are somehow paying taxes. And it would be interesting to know how measures of health, measures of life purpose, measures of satisfaction, personal satisfaction, we we just don't capture that. And there's not a good way to do that uh directly and tie it back to an institution.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

A little behind the scenes of the podcast, quite often after our our podcast ends, uh we sit for a while and have philosophical discussions. Uh our uh technical uh producer has a PhD in religion, so we get into some uh some great philosophical discussions with our our our guests. And some of those, it it is hard to measure some of the things. I mean, you know, people who are get a college degree or higher educated, are they the ones then that are gonna seek additional knowledge as they I mean, you know, just things that there's not data to really collect on. Right. Uh, but it's certainly interesting to to think about and and and talk about.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

And, you know, the more we we focus on improving graduation rates, the more we worry that we're attracting students who were gonna graduate anyway. And and you will get more of a selection bias the if if we continue to over-emphasize completion in a certain amount of time rather than the more holistic what you're talking about measures. Yeah. I think what what we're saying is is is the success of of an institution is more than one or two numbers. It's bigger than one metric in time or one size fits all uh measures.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

We have a lot of data.

unknown 33:06

There are a lot of data out there.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Absolutely. We we have a lot. It's the drinking from the fire hose thing uh sometime. We're collecting a lot, and then there's also some, but we're still not collecting, but but you have to do something with it. So where are we hitting the mark with that? And then where there's opportunities uh for growth of collecting the the data that we actually need and then using it, doing something with that.

SPEAKER_01 33:34

Well, you're so good at segueing all of it, connecting all of these questions to each other. I would say where we are hitting the mark is on the most structured areas, the content knowledge pieces, the things that we know how to define our licensure pass rates, our uh students' presentations, whether they're getting jobs, whether they uh can go out and be productive citizens in society. I think we do a fairly good job of measuring that. It's those those other pieces, the the living a purposeful life, being a good citizen, uh, showing social responsibility. Uh we look a lot at GDP rather than fulfillment in or purpose in in the those positions and those jobs that that people are working.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Yeah. Making those improvements at in a university is hard sometimes. It is. Because, you know, I've heard and and you might disagree with this and others might as well, but that faculty sometimes are like independent contractors. Now, you know, one of the things that's kind of interesting at Mississippi, a lot of times we have people who come and say, Well, I'm going to stay for five years. You know, and you know, 25, 30 years later, here they are. Um, but you you do have people focused on their own area. You have some uh turf protection, you have the silos that universities are famous for. And I think we're we're doing a much better job of of that. I think uh, you know, with the with the deans, really looking at it holistically, and you're certainly going to protect your own area, but I think looking at what overall what's best for students. So how do we move the needle in an organization like universities that's got IHL and SAC COC and departments and faculty governance, uh, which we could talk about that as well. There's a lot of things in the news uh and how that in that impacts. Um, but what does it take to kind of make those changes?

SPEAKER_01 35:40

Where I see it working well is when there are good common shared goals and people agree to those goals. They may not agree to all the exact terminology and they may they may still argue how it's being measured and what what's going to matter. But when there's large agreement in walking in a certain direction or following a certain pathway, that that tends to help. But along with it is the trust. And if there is good mutual trust and respect, that doing improvement work and and measuring effectiveness requires realistic self-appraisal, realistic assessment of where an institution is or where a unit is in its current reality. And if you are so scared that something's gonna happen to you, you're gonna get punished or uh something negative is gonna happen, then you won't be as authentic and as realistic about it. And secondly, if we are so focused on the process itself, then uh we're not measuring the pieces that are that are gonna matter. And it may be cases where that some of these units need only one or two really good measures and they focus on that, and that is their strength, that's what they're known for, that's what draws students to them. Then why are we fluffing it up with all this extra busy work? And uh that part of it tends to demotivate folks away from doing the the work that's going to matter to make improvements and make the institution effective.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

Yeah, sometimes having to show all the ways that our institution is effective actually goes against the effectiveness of our institution. Yes. Right. So we mentioned governance. How does that play into what you do? I mean, because we in the news right now, the governance, uh shared governance issues that have changed at Auburn, we've seen it at Texas, Florida.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

Well, in my world, when I I work with a lot of faculty, the way we work is individualized. It is meant to be. This is unique to your area, in your field, in your discipline. So giving them that agency and they get to determine what works for them and what it means in their area, it does not affect some of what we're seeing in the news is not affecting us in Mississippi State, because our faculty care deeply about their disciplines and what they're doing, and they are involved in that in that piece of it. And we as an institution are not in the business of telling them what needs to be taught and what needs to be focused on. Uh, by and large, I think there are some pockets where we can't escape it. It's just the way the state is going. And as unfortunate as that may or may not be, that that doesn't, I wouldn't say that that is happening broadly across the institution.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

Yeah. So as we as we close here, let's dream a little bit. So if you could redesign it, how institutional effectiveness, how accreditation for a university like like Mississippi State and and others, uh, what would that look like that would help us measure the things that we should measure, collect the data we should collect, use it to truly be effective. If if Dr. Tracy Bayum is the grand poo-bah of accreditation and institutional effectiveness, what would she do?

SPEAKER_01 39:02

She would get rid of all of the counting pieces of it. You know, so in when people think of institutional effectiveness, they think about all these reports that they have to write. And it has to be in this four-column matrix, and you have to have three learning outcomes and two measures for each of them, and they have to have a criteria for I would cut all that out and just say, what is it you're trying to accomplish? And how do you know you are accomplishing it? What evidence do you have? What are you using it for? How do you know that you are accomplishing what you're supposed to? That may be more narrative-based and less numerical. Uh, it will be harder and it will require more conversations. But what if we could record those conversations somehow and use that as the evidence rather than write this report and fill in these numbers in these particular cases? And you've got to do it by this date. And the way it is now is so retroactive. We're backing into a lot of it. If we could do more forward thinking, more forward planning and let go of some of the compliance pieces of it and let it take a little bit longer to be richer and more authentic. That that would be my preference. But right now we're in a system where you got to have three learning outcomes, you got to have two measures for each of them. You got to do it every single year. It's got to be due by the first Friday in September. And you will have to submit it and it's got to make sense to all these other people because they're going to read it and review it and judge you based on what that looks like. That changes how people engage in the process and it makes it less authentic.

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Because August and September is a slow time at universities, right?

SPEAKER_01 40:33

Right.

unknown 40:33

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

Well, and having done some IE reports and things, sometimes the questions, um, you we look at them and they're like, well, but that doesn't really make sense for what we're doing. And so you're trying to almost put a square peg in a round hole sometimes just so you can answer the question. And okay, we we're compliant, but we didn't really get to the heart of kind of what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 41:01

Yes. And if there were a way to automate more of it, to if we could build it out ahead of time, if we had a plan and we knew that this course or this experience or this activity was going to be relevant to us and find a way to collect that automatically and present it in a way, that would also decomplicate so much of it. But that that requires us to break the cycle we're currently in. Like I said, we're we're very retrospective. And if we could be more forward-looking, we could we could address some of that.

SPEAKER_00 41:30

Yeah. Well, thank you for being here. This is such a relevant topic. It's so important right now. It's critical to what's happening.

SPEAKER_01 41:37

It's been fun to to you know go in and and dream and think about what it could be, what it was it's supposed to be if we could let go of some of these things. So I appreciate the opportunity. It's been it's been fun. Yeah. So we'll we'll stay tuned and see what uh what the future holds. Yeah, what happens? It's changed all the time.

SPEAKER_00 41:54

That's right. Thanks, Jason. All right, thank you. Thank you for joining us on Uncharted State. We hope today's conversation sparked some new ideas about the future of higher education. It follows, so you never miss an episode. You never know what uncharted territory we'll explore next.