If college applicants and potential teachers have anything in common with current students and tenured professors, it’s this: They’re one more piece of data in an ever-growing mountain of it.
There was a time when higher education data was largely limited to things like enrollment numbers, demographic information and revenue. But with the increasing digitalization of institutional metrics — academic performance, tuition revenue, student health, diversity and inclusion, and more — has come a level of data proliferation that many colleges and universities are struggling to make sense of and manage.