I was in a social network research laboratory. Some of the best people at the lab went into industry while the others did do post docs. The professor that worked at the lab also went to Microsoft Research. Honestly if you were to go the route of being a professor or from MANGA what would you choose? Also, I think there are laws and also rules within Universities that would preclude the study to capture value and even then you would have to hire data analysts that would be external to being a professor so I think it would be hard to compete with MANGA in that regard also.
U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
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Re: U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
#22This is the type of article that makes me wonder: "therefore, what?" Yes, absolutely, universities are awash in data they do little to anything with outside of hyperfocused laboratories. I wonder if having central data management groups would be an enabler or a bottleneck, however.
Therefore they can’t optimize anything. They have 0 visibility into any of the operations and therefore can’t derive any insights or install controls. They have no idea if: Some professors more effective teachers than others. Which days students buy more food. Whether taking a given prerequisite leads to better mastery of advanced material. If additional spend is correlated with better student outcomes. For people in…
My school did course evaluations every year, and I’m under the impression that the Professor’ performance is tracked in the sense that if somebody was failing too many students, it would be noticed. Beyond that, I’m not sure how one could evaluate teaching without also being a subject matter expert. So this seems more like the sort of thing that ought to be handled by the professor’s expert peers, than data people or administrators.
Re: U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
#23Oh good - an opportunity to use "begging the question" for its original meaning.
I don't see a single example of "success" in the article. (They said "We unexpectedly found a pervasive void of infrastructure thinking and a relatively limited set of data-informed planning successes" but I must have missed the successful example.)
So the entire article describes what they think should be done, without any successful examples to show that anything useful can be done in the first place.
Re: U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
#24There's a troubling tone behind this article. It's a prophecy that demands to be fulfilled. Starting with the premise "Data is useful", it proceeds to pick at all the ways we've failed to make it useful... and we're damned well going to make it useful if it kills us! Maybe, just maybe (for those that dabble in the sceptical, explanatory game we call science) it might be that "bare data" has little use within certain…
There's a cost/benefit curve here. Having data can undeniably be useful. The question is, how much ROI does the insights in the data provide, relative to the cost to build the organizational infrastructure capable of extracting these insights? And there's a bootstrapping problem, because often it's hard to calculate the potential ROI without actually going through the work of building the infrastructure to process th…
Indeed, absolutely true. And furthermore, sometimes the value of data,
and of possible other sources, doesn't emerge until you start analysis
and then deductively see new collection opportunities. It's a
to-and-fro process.
> how much ROI does the insights in the data provide, relative to the cost to build the organizational infrastructure
Having seen the workings of academia for a long time now I'd argue very little.
But I think the problem is more subtle. A Heisenbergian problem. When data collection involves people you have a triple problem of intrusion, distraction, and ossification. the act of trying to create a "data driven culture" in some contexts simply kills what's there. The cost of this, in addition to the bootstrapping costs of sensors and analytics are paralysing.
Academia, by its very nature, if properly functioning, demands to be dynamic. If it's good, it will not stand still long enough for you to look at it. And if you measure it "too hard" it will evaporate as all the good people who resent ossification leave.
Re: U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
#25Obviously I’m 20 years past university and nearer being the paying parent, but why oh why should university “capture the value of data”. They should offer affordable education (if you believe in the value of tertiary education) and affordable signaling of abilities (if you don’t). A recent post by John Cochrane [1] somewhat pointed out the absurdity in US education, Stanford specifically. Stanford itself mentions 15750 non teaching staff members on
2288 professors. My kids K12 (EU) runs on about 6 administrators (excluding cleaning, but including all other staff) for 22 teaching staff, including upstream shared services in the city. In a high school the ratio is probably even better.
15750 administrators wanting to capture the value of data is just plain silly. (I’m going overboard here, but it’s about an order of magnitude of difference! I know of 50% differences in FTE/value in the market I work in, but x10…)
Re: U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
#26I have no doubt the problem is worse in academia, but to be quite honest nobody is really doing a good job at curating, governing and unifying data across large organizations (at least without extreme expense.) Just look at the treadmill of architectures designed to "solve" this problem: integrated databases to "data warehouses" to "linked data" to "data lakes" to "data fabric" to "data mesh." Organizations that succ…
I lived through an acquisition in the teens that I feel was an illustrative story. An old financial services provider embarked on a massive, whole organization modernization effort. The new CEO went all in and actually made the necessary investment in staff and headcount, which was remarkable in itself.
A big part of the effort involved providing customers with big data solutions and all the implied benefits that would entail. They jumped aboard the hype train with gusto. Each quarter progress was reported and margins improved with a clear upward trend. From the trenches it was clear that even with the investment made, it was still not enough to reach any of the goals.
After a year of “modernization” the company was acquired, the buyer literally salivating over the coming profit margin increase and “synergies” in selling into related markets. After another year post acquisition it became clear that the benefits were simply out of reach, and the profits did not arrive. The acquiring company was left with the low margin business it had always been. Layoffs ensued as the buyer sought to salvage something from the transaction.
Turned out the entire modernization and big data effort had been an elaborate bait and switch committed by the board and CEO of the acquired company, masterfully executed.
Re: U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
#27There's a troubling tone behind this article. It's a prophecy that demands to be fulfilled. Starting with the premise "Data is useful", it proceeds to pick at all the ways we've failed to make it useful... and we're damned well going to make it useful if it kills us! Maybe, just maybe (for those that dabble in the sceptical, explanatory game we call science) it might be that "bare data" has little use within certain…
This is generalizable. "____ is useful" is rarely (ever?) true by itself. Gasoline? Solar Panel? Turbine? Wings? Extra Food? Fertilizer?
Re: U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
#28As a data scientist, I think most data is useless, but there is an addictive, video game-like quality to throwing lifeless spreadsheets into a machine and having colorful visualizations come out. It's kind of like a very boring video game for adults that makes them feel like they're working, when they're actually just enjoying colorful abstract shapes and colors. To be honest, this is probably a sizable piece of why I'm in this line of work.
Re: U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
#29It seems like a somewhat weird mismatch — the described benefits are things like curriculum improvements and hiring better instructors, which I think most people (including most professors, I think, despite the fact that they’d be on the receiving end of this) would be in favor of.
But including security cameras in the list of tools seems… odd? What would they tell you? Classroom attendance I guess. But all that tells you is that the instructor is either so bad that nobody bothers showing up, or so good that their slides, recordings, etc are enough for the students to skip class sometimes. (And if you measure the number of students in the classroom, attendance will just become mandatory, this is dumb).
In general universities should be pretty inefficient I think. They are places where young people go to learn and try things out. Including student employees. If a university has no waste, that indicates that it hasn’t given enough possibly-unqualified undergrads enough resources to accidentally misuse.
Re: U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
#30Universities already waste vast sums of money of vice-provosts, middle management, administration, etc. There's no need to encourage them to start treating their mission as one of data mining in order to "capture" more value from the students.
While I agree with your general skepticism, I also believe there are ways these data could benefit the students. Extracting value from operational data could mean modernizing curriculum, offering more office hours, etc.