Data Priorities

CEI’s mission is “to provide open access to affordable, quality education that meets the needs of students, regional employers, and community.” CEI strategically studies our data to ensure that access is truly open throughout a student’s whole education. It often identifies hidden obstacles that keep our students from succeeding.

CEI is strategically promoting student achievement and closing barriers to academic excellence and success (equity gaps) by studying our disaggregated data as part of our mission.

Equity gaps are documented places where one group of students succeeds and another group struggles. We know that all students are equally smart, driven, and capable of success on CEI’s campus. If we find a specific group of students stumbling in a particular area, the College investigates how to fix the system, so everyone has an equal chance to succeed.

Said differently, equity gaps indicate that the College failed, not the student. CEI needs to offer different resources or additional access to existing resources.

To close equity gaps, we use problem areas as the launching point of experiments. We search our institutional practices to find obstacles and strategically test different solutions to increase achievement.

If the College can identify where some students struggle, the experience can be improved for every student. Our students achieve more credentials, regional employees get more valuable employees, the community’s economy and society grow stronger. CEI meets its mission.

To find equity gaps, CEI uses disaggregated or separated data. The federal government requires that we gather data and break it into specific groups, like age, ethnicity, race, and gender. CEI breaks down the results even further to compare the performance of different student groups.