Mary Fugate
I think it challenges institutions to think innovatively and break systems that they as an institutional researcher, this breaks my heart a little bit, but break the systems and break the thought processes and the confines we have. So instead of looking at first gen students just by their first year cohort, really expanding that data collection, like Stephanie said to the whole student life cycle, including on the application for graduation, right? So you can get that good alumni data collection. But another point of innovation is to think about like, what is the definition that best suits your population?

Heather Shea
Welcome to Student Affairs NOW the online learning community for Student Affairs educators. I’m your host, Heather Shea, today’s conversation focuses on the role of data in understanding and supporting first generation college students, especially at a time when national data collection efforts are shifting or disappearing altogether. We’ll explore what kinds of data we should be collecting, how institutions are using or maybe not using that data, and how first gen identity is both defined and understood in practice. We’ll also explore how campus partnerships and national networks like first gen forward are responding to this moment of uncertainty. Student Affairs NOW is a premier podcast and learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release our regular episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find us at studentaffairs now.com on YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is sponsored by first gen forward. First Gen forward collaborates with higher education, philanthropy, business, government and others to eliminate the completion gap and broaden post college opportunities for first generation students. As I mentioned, I am your host for today’s episode, Heather, Shea. My pronouns are she her and hers, and I am broadcasting from that ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabe, three fires confederacy of Ojibwe, Ottawa and Potawatomi peoples. This land, known today as East Lansing, Michigan, is home to Michigan State University, where I work in undergrad education. Incidentally, my role includes overseeing several persistence programs focused on first generation college students. So today’s conversation is particularly interested, interesting to me as well. So let’s get into the conversation now. Let me open up the gallery here. Stephanie, Mary, Amy, thank you so much for joining. Welcome to Student Affairs now before we get into a meat of our conversation, I’d love to have each of you introduce yourselves, who you are, what you do, and anything you’d like to share that connects you to our episode today, and we’ll start with Stephanie.

Stephanie Bannister
wonderful. Thank you so much, Heather. Let me start off by saying thank you for the work you do on campus on behalf of first generation students. We know that that’s critical, and we’re so grateful for your partnership. My name is Stephanie Bannister. I use she her pronouns. I have the honor of serving as the vice president for the first gen forward network, and what that means is that I get to work with a community of practice of over 429 institutions across the country who are committed to scaling and sustaining supports for first generation students. And what we know is that that work cannot happen if we do not know who our students are and how to serve them. So this topic is obviously near and dear to my heart. I’m coming to you from the middle of the country in Kansas, where I was at a place based practitioner at Kansas State University for many years. So I’m really excited to be on the call, and excited to have an institutional colleague in Amy here with me, and awesome. My colleague, Dr, Mary Fugate, so I’ll pass it over to Mary to introduce herself.

Mary Fugate
Yeah, thanks, Stephanie. My name is Mary Fugate. I’m the AVP of data analytics with first gen forward, and I have been on the team since 2020 as the first data hire, and now lead a team of really thoughtful, smart data analytics folks and researchers, and my portfolio is really covers kind of national research. We do, fact sheets, landscape scans. We have updated research briefs that we’re actively working on that are already starting to come out, as well as leading all of the network diagnostics for our institutions that Stephanie just mentioned. And so it’s been really interesting and rewarding to see how the data landscape has changed, even in just a five year period since I joined the team, and really excited to dive into this conversation today. So thanks for having us

Heather Shea
Awesome. Thanks so much. Mary.

Amy Goodburn
Amy, hi, yeah, thank you. My name is Amy Goodburn, and I serve as the Senior Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. I just finished my 30th year here at UNL and I’m also a professor in the English Department. I. In my savc role, I lead UNL initiatives to increase degree completion and close equity gaps. And as part of this work, I created first generation Nebraska, which is a campus network of faculty and staff committed to increasing outcomes for unls first generation students. And I was a first generation student, a low income student who went to college on Pell grants and federal work study. So I really believe in the power of higher education for social and economic mobility, and it’s really a privilege for me to work to try to transform our institution to better support all of our students, especially our first generation ones.

Heather Shea
Awesome. Well, it is awesome to have the three of you with us today on the podcast. So I think we’re going to start with a foundational question. We’re going to get to definitions in a second. But let’s start with the why. Why should we be collecting data in general, to understand our students and specifically, why should we be collecting data about first generation college students? Mary, I’m going to hand this to you.

Mary Fugate
Yeah. What a what an exciting first question. So I mean, it’s so important to collect data and good quality data about all of our students, especially first gen students. First gen students make up 54% of all college students nationally. And so when we talk about this conversation and first generation college students, we’re not talking about a small group of students. We’re talking about college students, and they exist at every institution. They hold every identity. We often talk about first gen students as first gen plus recognizing that you know, so many of them hold different identities as well that create meaningful experiences and data really help us as practitioners, as leaders, make thoughtful decisions about how to support students better, which is the ultimate goal. We want students to succeed at our institutions. We want them to graduate. We want them to find great careers, living wage jobs. And so really being able to capture all of these different types of data tell a really rich story. And so things we look at routinely are student level outcomes for students and first gen students, comparing continuing gen students with first gen students to look at equity gaps, things like what we call momentum metrics. So looking at enrollment, retention, credit completion ratio, which is a significant predictor of on time, degree completion, and then certainly looking at degree completion gaps. These outcome data really feed into conversations about return on investment, where leadership should be putting resources, both financial resources and human resources, to support students, but also looking at data beyond those quantitative metrics to look at sense of belonging. What are the experiences that first gen students are having what is the climate they are existing in, things like, what is their satisfaction at our institutions? And how can we better pivot to support the students while they’re at our institutions, all in real time, help from a student affairs perspective. So for context, my background was in institutional research before I started this national work, and so I’m constantly thinking about the institution perspective. But Student Affairs has such a rich data set, with student engagement data, in particular, how students are becoming involved, how they’re engaged in high impact practices. And all of these data really kind of weave together to tell a story about who students are, how they’re experiencing the university in different and unique and beautiful ways, and how that is kind of connecting to the broader picture of their success. And then when I when I think about the data we’re collecting, I also think about career outcomes and looking at those for first generation students. It’s certainly a gap that many of our institutional partners are trying to fill in identifying these students, and we’ll talk about definition here in a moment. But really starting to think about, you know, even after degree completion, what types of jobs are students going into what are their first and starting salaries? What are their salaries five and 10 years after? What’s the economic impact of these students in their communities and for their families? And so there’s, there’s a lot that we don’t know about the first generation college experience. And so by starting to build robust systems of data collection and data analysis, we’re able to start painting a fuller and brighter picture of of who these students are.

Stephanie Bannister
Awesome. I want to highlight one thing Mary said there at the end that I think is so powerful, you know, that interest in the career piece with data for. Generation students. And the reason why is because once you are first, you are always first, so when you show up to your first job, that’s very different as a first generation new professional employee. So this is bigger than higher education. This is how we connect to employers. This is how we help our communities understand, so that we can really build a civically engaged community that sees and meets us all where we are. So I really appreciate Mary voicing that, because it is about every step of person’s experience.

Heather Shea
Yeah, one of our we’ll link this in the show notes. One of our most watched episodes is about first gen student affairs professionals, and how even with a master’s degree, you know, again, it’s the same thing every at every point you’re showing up as first gen. So I think this is what makes this so interesting and unique. So Stephanie, let’s get into the definition, or definitions, I should say, because I think that’s the complexity, right? And talk a bit about how how the definition informs what data institutions might collect. And if this makes it difficult for I imagine it makes it difficult for Mary and you all to figure out, like, how do you do this kind of institutional like landscape analysis? So tell us all the things about definitions and what we need to know.

Stephanie Bannister
Yeah, I want to start with the that statistic that Mary shared, that we know that 54% of students coming to us are our first generation. We know that that number is actually much higher, and that’s because of the definition piece and the ways in which we gather that first gen student identifier, a definition shapes everything right? If we are not asking who we are accounting, then we don’t know what the trends are. We don’t know where we’re allocating resources. And while most systems often use a definition where no parent completed a bachelor’s degree, there’s actually a multitude of definitions out there, and they’re going to continue to evolve as we recognize students who come to us who may have no one in their network that attended university, and may identify with their champion as someone other than a parent. So how are we capturing that first generation student? So they’re complex because not everyone uses the same definition. We actually don’t advocate that we all use the same definition. We advocate that your institution look at its own unique context, where it’s placed. It could vary if you’re a two year or a four year. It could vary if you have a high international student population, right? But that you consider what your definition is, that you rally around a definition, that you make it visible, and that you think intentionally about where you ask that and then how often, there’s an opportunity for a student, when they realize they are first to update that information, or to have advisors update that information, because we know a lot of times what will happen with students is on their application, they might not mark that they’re first gen, but it could be in the classroom. It could be in an academic advising appointment that in the course of conversation a student will be like, Well, wait a minute. Actually, no, I am first and that changes how we meet them, where they are, and it changes, often, the access to resources that could be available on that campus, on that campus. So it’s a complex problem to tackle, but in the work that we do, we start by asking, Do you have a definition if you don’t audit what you know, and then move the conversation to forward, to align on a definition, and then to get clear on where you’re asking that and where you’re tracking that.

Heather Shea
Stephanie, can I ask a couple of follow ups? One I want to know based on what you know about the institutions across your network, how well are our current systems capturing the stories of first gen students and then kind of compared to that, like, how do we help students see themselves within the institution’s definition? Because sometimes that, it may have to do with somebody who’s not an immediate parent, or it may have to do with they are first in, you know, first generation American, but their parent has a degree from another country. So I’d love to hear like, how are our current systems doing in this regard, and how do we help students? See themselves.

Stephanie Bannister
I’ll start off, and then I would invite Mary to and Amy to jump in, because I think they’re going to have observations on this question too. I would say, overall, when we look back on the data we’re collecting from network institutions, that we are increasing in the number of institutions that ask who is first gen now, access to that data across the institution is uneven. The ability for that data system to grow and follow the student is uneven those infrastructures. And there’s a little bit of lag there, and that’s where we see work happening, is campuses interested in having leadership buy into understanding how we make data more accessible, how we use that data to drive setting priorities and moving work forward. So that’s oftentimes where we see that happening. So I think we are seeing lots of improvement, but there’s still lag, because it’s overwhelming to think about. Well, we ask it on the application, but if we were to update it later, what does that mean to the integrity of our data? Who do we give access to update it? So it’s a little bit more complicated there, but Mary and Amy, I’m curious if you had any insights, as Heather asked that question,

Mary Fugate
yeah. I mean, I think it challenges institutions to think innovatively and break systems that they as an institutional researcher, this breaks my heart a little bit, but break the systems and break the thought processes and the confines we have. So instead of looking at first gen students just by their first year cohort, really expanding that data collection, like Stephanie said to the whole student life cycle, including on the application for graduation, right? So you can get that good alumni data collection. But another point of innovation is to think about like, what is the definition that best suits your population? And so I have, you know, observed a lot of this innovation in the past several years, where people used to be very tied to what is referenced as the federal definition, which I say in quotes because there’s, there’s a lot of kind of conversation debate about this. But sometimes what we refer to as the trio definition of neither parent or guardian earned a four year college degree. There’s been a lot of innovation, and people saying, well, yeah, we have TRIO programs, but you know, this other definition of neither parent or guardian earned a college degree in the United States better fits our population. And so how can we kind of stand at both still have the trio reporting that we need to have done, but then also be able to serve our student population. And so it does require us to stretch our thinking and stretch our willingness to respond to students, but I think that’s what student affairs is so well positioned to do, is make those pivots and really be able to identify students and think differently than what we than what we have. And, you know, breaking our traditional data thinking to really identify and support these students.

Heather Shea
Amy, do you want to jump in here? And then I have a specific question for you. How do you define at your campus?

Amy Goodburn
Yeah, well, I would just add to what Mary’s saying, I think it really depends on who’s using the data and for what purposes. And I think initially on our campus, it was like just creating the data like we didn’t have it, and it was just about trying to access it and create the definitions that enable us to have data that we could then use. But then, as we think about it, then I think it’s a question of, for what purpose are you collecting this data? Is it at the local level? In my work with my teams, it’s about outreach. How are we identifying students who may have needs, concerns, issues, and getting them to the supports they need, and then rolling up a little bit with the college leadership? It’s really about using data to identify trends for different populations and figuring out, is there intersectionality between our first generation and our low income students or first generation transfer students, and thinking about all the different purposes for which we could then use that data to understand and assess our practices and our policies. And then pulling back further, it’s like, what are the institutional barriers that our students are facing, and how? How do we understand which students are facing those barriers? So I think it’s also really dependent on who’s who needs to see the data for what purposes, and that’s really sort of what we’re working on on our campus now, that we have the data, it’s not enough to have data, right? It’s how do you use it on a campus to make those transformative changes?

Stephanie Bannister
Yeah, Jamie, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, so I’m going to highlight something I learned from the University of Nebraska Lincoln when I was still at K State, and it was in run of our regional community meetings. Means that we have as a network, and early on, your institution did some work on the intersectional piece to not just know who was to know first gen, but to know the other parts of the student profile. But for me, that was the first time I really thought about that. And myself and a colleague at Wichita State did that analysis, and what we learned about who was first gen on our campuses was fascinating. And we found out that we were actually standing up programs and investing dollars for a small percentage of students, not fully understanding, you know, we made a broad generalization that we thought most of our first gen students were out of state. That was incorrect. Most of our first gen students were women from rural Kansas. So that shifts the way in which we’re going to support right and think about recruitment, onboarding and the classroom experience. So I’m glad you mentioned the intersectional piece?

Amy Goodburn
Yeah, I just to add to that, we’ve created a dashboard for all of our first year retention programs, and one of the tabs shows students who are in more than one program exactly. It’s not just only about a small population, but where are we duplicating our efforts? And then who’s not in any of those programs, right? So how do we leverage our resources, and how do we use data to really figure out how to touch for the biggest, you know, return on investment and to make sure that all students are having some equitable access to the resources that they need to thrive?

Mary Fugate
That’s one of the most powerful use cases of data as well to see, like, you know, from the whole pie, what is the slice that you’re serving, and then what is the rest of the pie that you’re not serving? And really, really thinking, again, innovatively, about, how do you break out of your normal programs and systems to support those students who might not be showing up in the traditional ways? Yeah,

Heather Shea
yeah. And it sounds like, specifically at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, it’s really evolved over time, right, to better serve the needs of first gen students. Maybe, could you unpack just a little bit more, you know, maybe where you started, and then now where you are, and how that maybe plays differently across institutional levels. So you know, from your vantage point to like a student affairs practitioner to the president, right? I mean, there, there you be talking about first gen from lots of different angles, for sure.

Amy Goodburn
Yeah, well, I’ve been in this role for 14 years, and I can say when, when I first came into the office, I had access to no data, or it was on PDFs, right, flat

Heather Shea
floppy disks.

Amy Goodburn
You couldn’t really find trends with intersectionality, because they were each separately produced. And you, you know, had to do some hard math for that, but I can say that we’ve really invested as a university in trying to figure out what are the data that we need to be able to make those transformative changes. And you know, we’ve got our Tableau license, which allows us to then feed our reports to many different stakeholders across the campus, depending on sort of their levels. So initially, it was just trying to understand those big picture trends, like how our first gen students doing compared to our continuing students in graduation rates and and retention, the metrics that Mary was talking about, and and persistence, in terms of 15 credit hours per semester, you know, just sort of the raw quantitative measures. More recently, we really focused on more qualitative measures, pulling in some of our student affairs colleagues. They’ve got some engagement data that they have for which students participated in our big red welcome activities, and now we can tie that to students who took our survey in their fourth week of the semester and raised concern. So so we have that data as well. And then most recently, we launched a set of dashboards that are instructor based, and they’re tailored to each individual instructor in our learning management system. So if I’m teach, I’m an English professor, if I’m teaching an English class, I can see on my dashboard, over time how my students have done historically for trend analysis over several iterations of a course. And I can look at first generation compared to continuing students. I can look at DFW rates. I can look at rural students, transfer students. It’s not just first gen, and then most recently we we were even just disaggregating at the assignment level. So I can look to see my colleague is a biologist who helps to organize and create these dashboards, and he can see whether first generation. Students are performing successfully on exams, or in which exam or discussion boards or projects, you know, really trying to hone in on, what are the effective practices in my classroom, and what are my assignments, where I see variations, if there are any, and then thinking about that, reflecting on that, why is that? Is it about academic preparation? Is about prior knowledge? Is it about assumptions that I have an instructor that I’m not unpacking for students who who don’t have a college going history? So we’re just sort of dipping our toes in that we’ve we’ve launched it last fall, and we had a symposium where we introduced about 80 plus faculty to playing around with those dashboards, but every instructor now has access to their own data so they can, you know, if they’re interested, inquire into how students are doing in their courses based on demographics.

Heather Shea
Wow, I’m, I’m like, astounded at the the the ways in which data could be really supporting students and also supporting faculty who were really trying to do the best work by their students, right? So that’s like, the micro level of data. Now we’re going to, like, talk about the, like the big macro level. And we’ve we’ve had Stephanie, I’m going to start with you. You know, we’ve had the National Center for Education Statistics. It’s played a really vital role in shaping not only institutional policy, but national policy, and advocating and supporting student needs, arguing for programs like trio. So talk to me a little bit about like, you know, why is that also aggregate, like large, national level data sets, valuable and and then we’ll go into the And now, what kind of question

Stephanie Bannister
not, not to oversimplify it, and I’m going to absolutely pass to Mary to share what she’s hearing in real time, as she is at conferences and working with partners across the country. But it it creates visibility, and it allows us to embrace equity and making good on Degree completion, our sole existence as an organization is to eradicate the completion gap, which is a significant gap that’s a driver for our entire country, right? None of that work is possible without that data set, because you don’t know who those students are. You haven’t defined that population. And in doing that, it allowed us to see a gap, and that’s a scary thing to see on paper, where we’re not meeting the mark and where we do have room for improvement. But because we had that, it allowed us to do exactly what you said. We could. We could inform policy. We could allocate funding in a different way, we could drive collective action. You know, it leads to advocacy work. It’s critical to have that set so that we can understand not only that moment, but dive deeper into other topics. We couldn’t have learned what we’ve learned about first generation, first generation students and COVID without the data that was there. What’s going to happen after this moment when we need to look back and learn? And that’s where I’m going to hand it off to Mary to talk a bit about what she has been hearing and discussing and seeing.

Mary Fugate
Yeah. Thanks, Stephanie. So and I’ll, I’ll caveat this that we are recording on June 23 and this is a changing landscape on a near daily basis, sometimes hour by hour, so I’m speaking with what I know in this moment. But yeah, so the threats to the National Center for Education Statistics is very alarming to us, because this is the only national source of first gen data, even when we think about iPads, which every institution that receives federal funding has to do that doesn’t even have questions about parental education or first gen status. So we’re really looking at the cohorted studies with the NCS to look at national data. And the studies that I just want to name are the National Post Secondary Student Aid study, the National Post Secondary or, sorry just said that beginning post secondary students longitudinal study, and then baccariate and beyond longitudinal study. And so what these studies do is they follow cohorts of students through their college experience and then beyond. And so without these data, we’re not able to get a good picture of who first gen students are, and really be able to identify just the the. Scale of who these students are at our institutions identify it by different intersectional identities by location. We often look at these data by state as well, to look at some of the demographic profiles state by state, and how that might impact the institutions we work with, looking at it sector by sector, to see two year institutions, or his four year institutions, public versus private. All of these data really feed into policy decision making at the federal level, at the state level, but also at the institutional level. Like Stephanie mentioned, knowing who your students are and the assumptions we have about first gen students. We also really use these stories to tell asset based storytelling about students. So, you know, first gen identity in general is something to be celebrated and not viewed through deficit lens. And so we’re able to use these data to one identify barriers that students have in accessing and succeeding in post secondary education, but we’re also able to tell the great stories that they’re, you know, great stories that they have in college and beyond. A great example is we have a number of fact sheets that have been downloaded 1000s of times, cited in research hundreds of times, and one of the series is on the career outcomes of first generation students one year and then four years after degree completion. And in these data, we’re able to see the economic impact of their first you know, median salary is quite on par with continuing gen students, but then we’re able to see some of the other economic impact data that will continue to create equity gaps in terms of long term earnings. But a great asset based story is that we see through these data, through these national data, that first gen students are more likely to go into careers where they’re civically engaged, working at nonprofits, working in the government. This is these are the students we want leading our country, leading our regions and special localities, but to be able to tell those stories in beautiful ways, to recognize first gen students are so connected to their communities and are really driven and motivated by that community care aspect. Those are all stories that we can back with these national data. And so the threats to the data you know are very alarming, just knowing that it’s erasing what we know about a national population, about the majority of our college students, and then being able to think through the impacts long term of what is this going to mean for policy if we can’t tell the stories from a national, national standpoint, and then also have comparison data between states as well, and be able to really drill down To the specialty populations that different folks are interested in in their own work.

Stephanie Bannister
I wanted, as Mary was describing that I’m like Amy, what would it be like for you in your role if you couldn’t know what you know about students like, how would you do the work that you’re doing on a daily basis? Can you imagine? Do you let yourself imagine? No, me neither. Let’s stay in that let’s stay in that box.

Amy Goodburn
It’s too depressing to think about it first of all, but also, I think our our institution, we’re a land grant, yeah, university, but founded on access and opportunity for Nebraskans, so if we stopped asking who’s first generation in our application, then we’re limiting ourselves in terms of really fulfilling the promise of what our mission is. And, you know, we would be remitting on what we’re saying to the state of Nebraska, that we’re trying to produce this educated workforce, you know, regardless of who comes into our our campus. So, I mean, Nebraska is a red state politically. So when those first flurry of executive orders were issued, you know, I we did have lots of discussions about, what can we collect? What can’t we can like, but ultimately, you know, we, we’ve pursued the same course, even if the national data set changes, I think will continue at our campus level, to to focus on the populations that are central to our mission and trying to understand and support them, where it will limit us, I think, is in collaborations nationally with others. And that would be that would be sad for me. You know, beyond our campus, UNL has been very involved in several partnerships. We were part of the APLU. Powered by Publix initiative. And while that has sort of ratcheted down, we still meet regularly with the seven other institutions in the big 10 academic alliance, and we shared our data across courses and disaggregated it so we could understand, collectively across our eight big 10 universities how students were doing in high enrollment courses, how first gen, low income, underrepresented, ethnic minority, racialized minority students were doing. And so I fear that if the national data set stops looking at those categories, that will complicate the work that we are trying to do across institutions to increase our students success, and that’s the whole point. Is to increase, as you said, close those gaps, increase degree completion for all of our students, regardless of what demographic identities and that they bring to our campus. Yeah, and

Mary Fugate
understanding some of those equity gaps by state too, so we have, like the National percentage of degree completion for a four year college degree. But then how can you benchmark yourself against the national data and your state level data? And when we talk about access to data, there’s no better access to data than the NCS, because there are data tools that anyone can use to find and access these information. Just aggregate the data by first gen and continuing Gen based on a variety of different parental education levels, so you can really customize the data to benchmark against your own institutional definitions and understanding and so that that also is concerning to me, if the access to those types of benchmark data go away. And I’m excited to talk about solutions in a little bit, because I think there are some, there are some things taking off right now as solutions, but the greatest solution would be if the NCS was upheld. There’s already one cohorted study that was supposed to run this spring that was canceled, giving us an update to students that started in 2020, our special COVID cohorts of students, and we’re really already grieving the insights that we’re losing on how those Students fared, especially first gen students who are disproportionately impacted by the COVID 19 pandemic. Yeah,

Heather Shea
yeah. I think it makes me wonder. I mean, I think anytime we don’t have national level data, I mean, for sure, it impacts our campuses, but it can be directly translated into policy as well as appropriations, yeah. And so then I wonder, like, who’s suffering, who’s benefiting? Does any of this have like a logical purpose? I have a hard time seeing what that might be, but I’ll open it up for anyone to discuss.

Stephanie Bannister
Well, I wonder if we I wonder if we have an opportunity to shift the dialog and narrative like I’m reflecting on what Mary shared about data and data being asset based, and then what Amy shared about working out a land grant, and part of the mission is making good on student success. And I think one of the things we are forgetting to acknowledge is that in many ways, the system of higher education, the system at a large level, has not modernized to keep up with the learner or the folks working in the system. So when I think back as a practitioner, I had students in my living learning community, my first generation student living learning community, who said they were not first generation because they came to 4h camp at K State, and they came to every home football game, so they knew about K State, and it wasn’t until Week Six when they realized they had missed a piece that we had to go back, and I had to interrogate the fact that we use language, we had policy. We put things into practice that didn’t meet the learner where they are. So I almost wonder if we have an opportunity to think about this as a student success imperative, like, what do we need to know to be able to facilitate learning and career attainment and economic vitality? And it is to know who is in the system, yeah, and how to best support them.

Amy Goodburn
Yeah. Amy, I think that that goes to sort of the biggest question I’ve been pondering around data is, how can we collectively work as universities to restore public faith in the power of education? Don’t think we’ve done a good job of drawing that through line for our first generation students to demonstrate that earning their degree. Will have a transformative impact for their families and their communities. And how, I don’t know if we really have told those stories as powerfully as we need to, because it’s become sort of an individualized good instead of a public good to begin with, education, and then I don’t think we are using our data to help our first gen students make the case for why they should even attend college anymore. And I think that gets back to what Mary was talking about with the career outcomes. I’m not sure that we tell those stories very effectively to families, to legislators, the why, and so maybe we haven’t been using our data effectively enough to really focus on the storytelling. We maybe used it within internally, within our institutions, to serve the students that we have. But where are we capturing the students who are coming to our campus or who are feeling, even after they’ve been at our campus that they didn’t get that return on investment that we had sold them.

Heather Shea
I think anytime I have an episode and the public good is brought into the conversation, I’m like, Yes, that is the ultimate like we need to communicate better the value of higher education. And I wonder, you know if, if, this might be a moment where we can really cap, capitalize on, on some of the losses, but identify what the values are. All right, so let’s move towards the towards the collective action, the advocacy, the transparency. Barry, do you want to kick us off of some things that you know, the net, the network is done, yeah? Leverage this data and what? What is happening?

Mary Fugate
Yeah? So, knowing that you know, even when the NCS was fully staffed, fully funded, we were still lacking a lot of data through that we partnered years ago with the National Center, not National Center for Education Statistics, National Student Clearinghouse. All the acronyms are in my brain right now. They have a platform called the post secondary data partnership, the PDP that we leverage with many of our institutions, where institutions submit student level records to the PDP, and they’re able to get dashboards about all of these different metrics that we’ve been talking about, including disaggregation by first gen and continuing Gen. And so that’s something that we have really leaned into as a solution for getting student level data that we and our institutional partners can disaggregate, get benchmarking data for against all the other institutions in the PDP. And you know, kind of more context history, the federal government banned a student level data collection in 2008 2008 ish, there have been a lot of policies and movement in the sense, but you know that looking at student level outcomes are so important, and IPEDS looks at aggregated outcomes. So for us to be able to look at not only first gen and continuing judge students, but all of the intersectional identities, including by Pell status and by part time, full time status, all of these different student characteristics, is is really valuable in telling the story and also looking at return on investment. Return on investment is something that many of our institutional partners are actively working on and trying to do, and we actually have a storytelling symposium that Stephanie can talk a little bit more about, but yeah, so there’s a lot of national conversation and like, what else can we stand up from a national level where, you know, we really believe that the post secondary data partnership is fulfilling what we need from a national level as well as a institutional level. But there’s also a lot of advocacy work that can be done to continue to push national data systems to continue to stand up. And there’s been progress in rehiring some NCS staff movements toward restoring some of the systems, and so I think this will take time to redo what has been undone. But you know, continuing to work on a national platform to advocate, calling your senators, letting them know the percent of first gen students in your state is huge because many senators and representatives might not know that information. And so I think there are a lot of ways that we can personally advocate as well in our own states.

Heather Shea
Stephanie Amy collaboration across institutions. What else are you seeing as positive ways of maintaining transparency and advocacy?

Stephanie Bannister
Yeah, I can start and then pass it on to Amy. One of the things that I am so inspired by and encouraged in this moment is that this is a hard time to do this work on a college campus. It’s a hard time to be human, but when you are shepherding, um, the success of students who often go unseen, that’s just a rough space when everything flies in the face of that, right? Yeah, but we see collectively, institutions continue to show up. They share best practice. They’re willing to share what’s working and what’s not working. And for many years, I think Higher Ed was so competitive, but when it comes to first gen students in particular, you’re not going to get a lot of people who don’t want to rally around their own first gen story, or elevating what is what is working. I just saw a blog post today on a course recovery project that one of our institutions is undertaking, and yes, while it’s designed for a first gen student, it’s going to benefit every student on that campus. So I’m encouraged by the standard bearing that institutions do in in the ways in which they want to support their first generation students, and that they’re willing to show that in a collective way. The other thing that that I would highlight is they maintain a commitment to setting goals and to continuously improving. And the reason why I think that’s important and I would welcome an alternate viewpoint, but what I would offer is that student affairs historically is not a hard science, and we don’t have the same expectation to publish, to perish, to share scholarship on the value add to what Amy said earlier, and in many ways now, Student Affairs has become student success. You’d consider that a new initiative within the last decade, if you will. Well, now is our moment to be documenting the return on investment, to share the data points that show why it makes a difference and why it is a value. And to get creative, I think we do have to come with some solutions that aren’t on a quarter system or a 16 week system or online. We have to think about credentialing, certificates and new ways of learning. And there’s no one better than folks who are doing the work right now to ideate on what a new path forward could be. And I think the business sector and leadership would be interested in a reimagination or a reawakening in many ways, of how we deliver learning and how we credential the learning that’s happening.

Heather Shea
Amy, what about you? What are your thoughts on?

Amy Goodburn
Well, I think there’s so many opportunities for collaboration, as Stephanie and Mary just said, I mean, within my institution, I don’t think Student Life and academic affairs have ever been so aligned in terms of sharing data and in order to support students. I mean, just last week, I was in a meeting where our Office of Housing, student life and Campus Recreation was, which are all in student life. We’re meeting with our director of our academic navigator team, which is in academic affairs to look at a list of students who still haven’t registered for fall. And we looked at which students are affiliated with these organizations. They’re active in student organizations where the Student Life Office can reach outreach to them, or that they work at Campus Rec, which over 500 of our students work at Campus Rec, and so they’ve built relationships. So using the data to then rely on personal relationships for outreach is something that wouldn’t have happened even five years ago on our campus. But thinking more broadly around first generation, I think Stephanie’s right, like, I don’t know anybody who’s like against supporting the success of first generation students. Where I’m active in the Association for undergraduate education at research universities Uru, which is a consortium of 130 plus research universities, and at every meeting, there’s always some topic around first generation students or using data to support student success. I’m part of the big 10 Network that that too. And of course, I’m really looking forward to Thursday and Friday’s convenient of the champion network for First Gen. Forward to get to get in the room with colleagues and just brainstorming and sharing ideas. I think we’re all very, very. Generative and collaborative, because we know that collectively, this is, this is our mission, and we work better together. So that continues to excite me, regardless of what you know, national drama is happening, I think just remaining focused on the core mission of what we’re trying to accomplish for our students,

Mary Fugate
it’s been, it’s been really interesting to go kind of through the conference circuit this spring. You know, national conferences like NACE and the Association for Institutional Research and the NASA conferences. And personally, people are feeling really frustrated and sad and disheartened. But then there’s also such passion, and the demand keeps increasing for continued focus on first gen students and on data and on storytelling and so like there’s there’s sadness and frustration, and there’s also a lot of hope and grounding in that. You know, we as practitioners and as leaders continue to really be invested in these students, and that’s all across the country, regardless of state, regardless of political backgrounds and whatever’s happening at the state and federal level. Yeah.

Amy Goodburn
Well, so many of us were first generation ourselves, and we already have that grit, so this is not going to be getting in our way.

Mary Fugate
One of the best assets of first gen students,

Heather Shea
absolutely, the stick to itiveness, right? I think, I don’t know who said it, but I think the moving from a place of competition to collaboration and coalition building is maybe, you know, maybe the silver lining. And I think the sharing of data and transparency across our institutions and but better practices is the other kind of key piece. I am so grateful to the three of you for joining the conversation today. We always end our podcast with the same question, given what we were just talking about, maybe you’re something specific. But what are you thinking about? Pondering troubling now and Amy, we’ll start

Amy Goodburn
with we’ll start with you Sure. Well, I’ve already talked about sort of storytelling for higher education, but one thing that I’ve been pondering is, how can the use of AI help us to better analyze the data that we already collect in ways that we might not think about, to find insights. And so I don’t I am not really big into AI. I’m probably the least technologically sophisticated person on this call, but I’m interested in thinking about what opportunities AI might lend to us in furthering our mission.

Heather Shea
That’s great. How about you, Mary,

Mary Fugate
I am constantly thinking about the national data and specifically, how can we as researchers? How can we as mentors to the next generation of researchers really thoughtfully consider how to collect meaningful data, if not at the national level, then what can what types of quantitative studies can we do? What type of mixed method studies, Student Affairs research and Student Success research really leans heavily on qualitative data, which is certainly important, but we also need the quantitative storytelling. And so how can we kind of foster this as a collective and in collaboration, to really keep telling the stories of first gen students and all their successes and what beautiful things they bring to our institutional communities and leave leave hope with the next generation of researchers and people that are trying to finish their doctorates right now or starting grad school, knowing that some of these national data may not be available to them. To really dive into

Heather Shea
Stephanie, I’ll leave it to you for final words. So what are you thinking about, pondering or any other final thoughts?

Stephanie Bannister
It’s like, well, this conversation, I this conversation is like running through my brain, and I am leaving more hopeful than when I logged on. And I think in many ways, it’s because of a reminder that no matter what we face and the amount of technology distraction we have. Human beings are social, and they’re meant to be in community and conversation and relationship with one another. And one of the things we know at first gen forward, we just turned eight in eight years, a national movement that elevates scholarship, research, data, a community of practice, advocacy, go and grew and grew because of the heart work and the might work, and we are part of something this, in this moment, and how we respond to what we are being dealt. It could be really powerful. We could get creative, we could be innovative. We can turn into one another and see how we move forward, or we could not. And I choose to believe we’re going to lean in and that brings me a lot of hope and encouragement, because I know over the course of my career, I let other people raise my children so I can work in higher education, because I believe that it transforms lives and communities. So I’m pondering being hopeful in tumultuous times at the moment,

Heather Shea
yeah, yeah. I talk a lot about critical hope, right? And that’s the we gather the information and we do it anyway, right? You know, we we lead with intention to change systems. And as a member of first gen forward as as a as a campus, I’m really grateful for the work that you all do to bring together the community, because those calls, I think, are restorative, and this call today has been really restorative. So I’m really grateful to the three of you for joining sharing your wisdom on the podcast. I also we always give a shout out to our awesome producer, Nat ambrosey. Thank you so much for all the work that you do to make us look and sound great. And then thanks again to our sponsor today. First Gen forward collaborates with higher education, philanthropy, business, government and others to eliminate the completion gap and broaden post college opportunities for first generation students. The first gen forward network is helping over 400 higher ed institutions across the country advance academic and co curricular outcomes and build more inclusive structures for first generation students so you can learn more. We’ll put this link in our show notes at visit WWW dot first gen forward.org So to all of our listeners, if you’re tuning in today and haven’t yet subscribed to our weekly newsletter. Head over to our website, student affairs now.com and enter your email. You’ll get the latest episode delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday. And while you’re there, please be sure to explore our episode archives and YouTube playlists. In addition to this, our main series, we also have, here’s the story and current campus context, which are two unique channels within the student affairs now family offering different lenses on how the Higher Education and Student Affairs field should be responding in this moment and all of the past episodes are easily accessible from our homepage. So if you enjoyed today’s conversation, please share it with a colleague or friend and help us grow once again. I’m Heather. Shea. Thanks to everyone who’s watching or listening. Let’s make it a great week.

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