North East Association for Institutional Research

Enhancing Institutional Capacity to Analyze Student Success
Date/Time
9/17/2026
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern
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Event Type(s)
Workshop Webinars
Event Description
Postsecondary institutions are under increasing pressure to understand whether their programs are working — and for whom. Yet many institutional research teams lack the time or infrastructure to build systematic, replicable analyses exploring student retention and completion from scratch.

This session introduces the Strategic Data Project's (SDP) publicly available CTE Diagnostic Toolkit, a flexible diagnostic framework originally developed for CTE programs that translates readily to broader postsecondary student success analysis. The toolkit provides step-by-step analyses, sample code, visualizations, and guiding questions organized around four core inquiries: comparing completion rates across programs, identifying equity gaps by demographics and preparation level, tracking student movement and transfer behavior, and pinpointing gateway course barriers to completion.

Participants in this session will:
  • explore analyses and visualizations drawn directly from the toolkit and will discuss how its structure and methods can be adapted beyond CTE to examine student success across program types, credential levels, and institutional contexts. Whether attendees are building new analytical capacity or looking to reduce duplicative work, they will leave with practical strategies for using the toolkit to generate actionable insights and support data-informed decision-making at their institution or within their system.
  • be able to identify the four core diagnostic modules of the SDP CTE Pathways Toolkit and describe the student success questions each module is designed to answer.
  • be able to intrpret the types of analyses and visualizations the toolkit produces, including completion rate comparisons, equity gap analyses, and gateway course barriers, and explain what those outputs can reveal about student success at their institution.
  • be able to evaluate how the toolkit's analyses, sample code, and guiding questions can be adapted to their institution's data structure, program context, and strategic priorities.

Intended Audience: This session is relevant for institutional researchers and data analysts at two- and four-year colleges and universities, state agency staff supporting postsecondary data and accountability, and data leaders at higher education systems offices. Participants are expected to be able to:
  • Query and manipulate student-level datasets, including linking records across enrollment terms and programs of study
  • Calculate common postsecondary student outcome metrics such as retention rates, completion rates, and transfer rates from student unit record data
  • Interpret crosstabulated data and basic regression or logistic regression output, including the direction and significance of coefficients
  • Work with common postsecondary data constructs such as program of study, credential type, gateway courses, and credit accumulation
Format:  Webinar - recorded sessions in which attendees view content and interact only via chat

Cost:  $40 - Member; $100 Non-Member

Presenter: Rachel Worsham, Harvard University  

Thursday, September 17, 2026; 10:30 AM - NOON
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