Benchmarking Project Gains Momentum

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SPOTLIGHT: Community Colleges

This spotlight appeared in Business Officer Magazine, January 2007

Higher education institutions are pressed to become more accountable to regional accrediting agencies, state governing boards and legislatures, businesses, and the general public. As early as 1999, T.W. Banta noted in Assessment in Community Colleges: Setting the Standard for Higher Education ( National Center for Higher Education Management Systems): “Never before has higher education been subjected to such close scrutiny by public stakeholders.”

In response, community colleges and other institutions have developed initiatives to assess institutional effectiveness and student learning outcomes. The League for Innovation in the Community College launched two such quality-assessment efforts: the Institutional Effectiveness Task Force and the “Learning Outcomes for the 21^st Century” project. Similarly, the American Association of Community Colleges published its research, Core Indicators of Effectiveness for Community Colleges.

Implied in this work is the expectation that eventually colleges will focus externally to gauge themselves against relevant data from comparable, peer institutions. However, until recently, no existing data-collection and reporting processes were available for gathering such information on a national basis.

To fill the void, staff in the Johnson County Community College (JCCC) Office of Institutional Research, with the assistance of a national advisory task force, created the National Community College Benchmark Project (NCCBP) in 2003 to provide a national data-collection and reporting process that enables community colleges to compare student outcomes and performance indicators with those of peer institutions. Data have been collected and reported annually since 2004.

Customized Comparisons
The NCCBP collects and reports a wide array of data on student outcomes, developmental education, minority participation, workforce development, distance learning, faculty load, cost, and human resources. Institutions that submit data receive an annual aggregate national summary, which includes results of all project data elements reported at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles, as well as their institution’s data for comparison. The project Web site includes a “Participant Only” section for creating customized peer groups and benchmarking project data elements in real time.

In 2005, the report helped JCCC determine that nearly 80 percent of its career program graduates were employed in a field related to their selected major. This achievement places the college at the 83^rd percentile of all colleges participating in the project and even higher among the college’s peer group of large community colleges. Benchmark data of this type are crucial for institutions interested in continuous improvement. The data also benefit community colleges, such as JCCC, that participate in alternative, quality-improvement-based, regional accreditation processes. The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, for example, offers the Academic Quality Improvement Program. 

Growing Participation
NCCBP enrolled more than 150 institutions in the 2006 data collection and reporting cycle, including all two-year colleges in the New York, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Florida state systems. Project enrollment is expected to increase in 2007 to 200-250 institutions of the nearly 1,200 community colleges nationwide.

RESOURCE LINK Details are available at www.nccbp.org.

SUBMITTED BY Jeffrey A. Seybert, director of research, evaluation, and instructional development, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas jseybert@jccc.edu