Across higher education, student outcomes are gaining greater attention as administrators and faculty leaders work to understand how to comply with federal policy changes that require institutions to measure and provide data on the career trajectories and earnings of graduates.
A primary catalyst for this focus is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s (OBBBA) requirements that higher education institutions provide more outcomes-based data than they do today to continue receiving federal monies to fund their programs.
From our conversations and research, it’s clear that while there’s broad agreement that higher education institutions will need to provide more outcomes data reporting, there’s far less clarity on the nature of the exact nature of the data the federal government will expect to see and who, across administration, faculty and governance teams, will gather the data and publish it.
But one thing is eminently clear: Higher education institutions will need to do a better job of tracking how students fare in their careers, connecting degrees they receive to the economic realities of what those degrees deliver in terms of professional advancement and compensation. The OBBBA’s data-reporting requirements reflect a sobering reality of our current time: The return students and their parents receive from their investments in higher education have and will continue to come under scrutiny.
We believe this is good news for higher education for four key reasons:
First, the outcomes reporting requirements can help resolve long-standing friction between administration and faculty leaders. At some institutions, it’s a tug-of-war, or even a standoff, between passionate faculty leaders with firmly rooted beliefs about the degree programs their institution must offer, and administration leaders questioning the relevance of some degrees to the realities students encounter when they graduate and start their careers. Outcomes data can help both groups move beyond the current state.
Second, there’s no denying that today’s “enrollment cliff” creates more competitive pressure among higher education institutions to attract students and their tuition dollars. The institutions that fare best in this more competitive environment will be those who are best able to show, if not prove, the value of the degrees and education they provide, especially as prospective students and their parents become more cautious and circumspect about higher education investments.
Third, advances in technologies and tools, most notably the rise of AI and data science capabilities, unlock new ways for higher education students to access, distill and report the outcomes data the federal government will now require. At some colleges and universities, there’s considerable handwringing over who should gather outcomes data, how it might be gathered and how much it may cost to produce. New technologies and tools help higher education students work around and through the data silos that currently exist and, arguably, have thwarted past attempts to make outcomes data reporting a priority. It will enable moving to a more comprehensive, standardized understanding of what outcomes data can and should look like—a good thing for everyone.
Finally, the prospect of outcomes data reporting requirements creates an opportunity for higher education institutions to build more formidable partnerships with the business community. Once collected, outcomes data can offer colleges and universities a roadmap to better understand the knowledge, perspective and skill sets businesses now require and to reshape courses and curricula they offer.
We share the sentiments of former Secretary of Commerce and Rhode Island governor, Gina Raimondo. Her New York Times opinion piece highlights how outcomes-based reporting and deeper connections between higher education and business can help avert an unemployment crisis while ensuring both remain relevant for the future: “A new grand bargain between the public and private sectors can help us meet this moment. I know we have the ingenuity to do it. What’s missing now is the collective will.”