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Universities already waste vast sums of money of vice-provosts, middle management, administration, etc. There's no need to encourage them to start treating the

by pcrh 4y ago

Universities 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.

foreverCarlos 4y ago
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.
- civilized 4y ago
  I think most of the value of "data" is captured in empowering individual contributors to observe their working conditions and the impact of their actions and adapt their strategy in response. The power of the central office spreadsheet wielders is very secondary. (Which is of course not to say that spreadsheets are not valuable, as any teacher knows.)
  - foreverCarlos 4y ago
    In an ideal world - yes. But seeing how overworked professors and other staff members already are in top universities, I doubt this is top of mind for them. There are courses with hundreds of enrolled students, weekly homework, practical projects, etc. IMO somewhat centralized DS tools are more suited to handle this load than an individual contributor (a professor in this context).
blthree 4y ago
You have a point about the amount of money spent on admin at Universities, but I think you (and most commenters here) don't really realize how bad the data situation is at a lot of major universities. If we want to streamline admin overhead at public universities, there's an incredible amount of time and money wasted due to extremely inefficient use/access to data. I work as a BI dev at a large Big 10 school (50k students/35k faculty and staff). For all those students and staff, there are a grand total of 3 data engineers, who are responsible for all our central data warehouses, including DBAing our oracle and redshift DBs. Just to get a new (untransformed) table added to the data warehouse from a source takes 6+ months, and that's only if it's from a source with an existing integration. On top of that, there are at least 50 people I know of whose job is basically to produce one or two reports manually in excel every week, and this isn't even considering people in finance or accounting. I'm talking about simple things like how many active research grants do we have, or how many students have enrolled in certain courses. These are reports (and entire fte positions) that could easily be automated with a single SQL query. Speaking of SQL, outside of the data engineering team, there are only 4 or 5 people who know any SQL out of the 100 I know of in reporting/BI positions. The "advanced" data teams are using MS access as an ETL tool to pull together data for tableau reports. However, there are a lot of institutional issues that make fixing those problems difficult. For one, while we have a central IT dept, we also have about 10 individual college-level IT teams, which means that data isn't just in different databases, but on a whole separate network. For example, if I want to create a report on student faculty ratio, I need to connect to VPN 1 to export faculty data from redshift, then switch to VPN 2 to export student data from Oracle, then switch to VPN 3 so that I can upload both datasets to our depts SQL server. After all that I can finally write a SQL query to get a student faculty ratio. Oh and when we need to update that ratio in a month, I'll have to go thru the whole manual extract/load process again. Forget automating that, since the network teams have no incentive to allow any tunnelling or bridging from one network to another. I could rant about this all day, but I think it's fair to say that there are still a ton of low-hanging fruit inefficiency-wise at universities. If we could get universities to value their data more highly, maybe that wod have the additional effect of solving some of these problems and even be a net money saver.
- pcrh 4y ago
  If such proposals would result in reduced expenditure on administration, it would obviously be beneficial. However, I note that your comments largely remark on an insufficient attention given to administration. The trend in Universities over the past few decades has largely been to increase administration efforts, without that having a notable benefit on student outcomes.

by pcrh 4y ago

foreverCarlos 4y ago

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.

civilized 4y ago
I think most of the value of "data" is captured in empowering individual contributors to observe their working conditions and the impact of their actions and adapt their strategy in response. The power of the central office spreadsheet wielders is very secondary. (Which is of course not to say that spreadsheets are not valuable, as any teacher knows.)
- foreverCarlos 4y ago
  In an ideal world - yes. But seeing how overworked professors and other staff members already are in top universities, I doubt this is top of mind for them. There are courses with hundreds of enrolled students, weekly homework, practical projects, etc. IMO somewhat centralized DS tools are more suited to handle this load than an individual contributor (a professor in this context).

blthree 4y ago

You have a point about the amount of money spent on admin at Universities, but I think you (and most commenters here) don't really realize how bad the data situation is at a lot of major universities. If we want to streamline admin overhead at public universities, there's an incredible amount of time and money wasted due to extremely inefficient use/access to data. I work as a BI dev at a large Big 10 school (50k students/35k faculty and staff). For all those students and staff, there are a grand total of 3 data engineers, who are responsible for all our central data warehouses, including DBAing our oracle and redshift DBs. Just to get a new (untransformed) table added to the data warehouse from a source takes 6+ months, and that's only if it's from a source with an existing integration. On top of that, there are at least 50 people I know of whose job is basically to produce one or two reports manually in excel every week, and this isn't even considering people in finance or accounting. I'm talking about simple things like how many active research grants do we have, or how many students have enrolled in certain courses. These are reports (and entire fte positions) that could easily be automated with a single SQL query. Speaking of SQL, outside of the data engineering team, there are only 4 or 5 people who know any SQL out of the 100 I know of in reporting/BI positions. The "advanced" data teams are using MS access as an ETL tool to pull together data for tableau reports. However, there are a lot of institutional issues that make fixing those problems difficult. For one, while we have a central IT dept, we also have about 10 individual college-level IT teams, which means that data isn't just in different databases, but on a whole separate network. For example, if I want to create a report on student faculty ratio, I need to connect to VPN 1 to export faculty data from redshift, then switch to VPN 2 to export student data from Oracle, then switch to VPN 3 so that I can upload both datasets to our depts SQL server. After all that I can finally write a SQL query to get a student faculty ratio. Oh and when we need to update that ratio in a month, I'll have to go thru the whole manual extract/load process again. Forget automating that, since the network teams have no incentive to allow any tunnelling or bridging from one network to another. I could rant about this all day, but I think it's fair to say that there are still a ton of low-hanging fruit inefficiency-wise at universities. If we could get universities to value their data more highly, maybe that wod have the additional effect of solving some of these problems and even be a net money saver.

pcrh 4y ago
If such proposals would result in reduced expenditure on administration, it would obviously be beneficial. However, I note that your comments largely remark on an insufficient attention given to administration. The trend in Universities over the past few decades has largely been to increase administration efforts, without that having a notable benefit on student outcomes.