Online dashboards displaying key metrics can help focus stakeholder attention on progress in community college workforce development efforts. Two Ohio community college leaders will detail their approaches in a presentation at AACC 2025 in April.
“There’s a very high level of interest in Ohio right now around workforce outcomes and the value of different levels of postsecondary credentials — we continually get questions around that from our stakeholders,” says Laura Rittner, vice president of operations and student success at the Ohio Association of Community Colleges (OACC) and one of the presenters. “These types of dashboards can help address that interest.”
This article continues a series examining some of the topics and sessions that will be featured at the American Association of Community Colleges’ annual convention April 12-16 in Nashville, Tennessee. Register today.
The presentation will provide insights on how community colleges can better describe employment trends and workforce development program effectiveness, ultimately enabling colleges to better align their offerings with workforce demands and enhance the success of their students, notes co-presenter Thomas Jay Benjamin, director of institutional research for Lorain County Community College (LCCC).
The session, “Measuring Statewide Workforce Development Outcomes, Together,” will describe OACC’s and its members’ development of two dashboard efforts displaying workforce-related outcomes of Ohio’s 22 community colleges to internal stakeholders, with plans for a wider audience, Rittner says.
Industry focus
One dashboard, the Ohio Semiconductor Collaboration Network (OSCN) Metrics Dashboard, gauges Ohio community colleges’ progress on activities related to achieving the long-term goals of the OSCN, notes Benjamin.
The dashboard, which is up and running, measures and displays the levels of OSCN-related community college activities to provide professional development, curriculum adoption, and the number of enrollments and completions in semiconductor and advanced manufacturing engineering technology programs. That includes the extent to which the colleges are adopting the common statewide courses that OSCN developed to provide training specific to semiconductor technology, Benjamin says. The dashboard shows the results of the first round of data collected in 2024 and will be housed on OACC’s website in conjunction with LCCC.
The dashboard enables disaggregation of program enrollment, course enrollment and program completion data by gender, and underrepresented minorities. The dashboard also provides information on the extent to which the community colleges are providing holistic student supports to make sure that students can stay on track in their program. It also includes data on professional development opportunities, as well as views on how well such supports are working.
Working together
The dashboard was designed by a team of institutional researchers from many of the 22 community colleges in summer 2024. It draws from an OSCN self-assessment survey that gathered data on the extent to which state community colleges have implemented different strategies established through OSCN, as well as some additional open-ended responses, Rittner says.
In addition, OACC developed a tool whereby community colleges could leverage their existing submissions to the Ohio Department of Higher Education by having the tool aggregate the information OSCN sought in a consistent format that could be inserted into the dashboard.
The collection of qualitative information allows tracking of stakeholder concerns and developing a community of shared knowledge.
“It confirms what we hear from colleges individually and assures them that their needs and challenges are not unique or isolated to their institution and are, rather, things we can work together on,” Rittner says. “We’ve never had a semiconductor industry here, so we need to work together to explain what that’s all about, and who is a good candidate for going into those jobs.”
LCCC and Columbus State Community College are the lead grantees for the project.
A more comprehensive data project
The other dashboard initiative, the Prosperity for Ohio Mapping Credentials to Success project (Mapping Credential project), is also focused on workforce outcomes but is a larger endeavor that seeks to describe the employment and wage outcomes for post-graduates for all 22 Ohio community colleges.
Still in development, the Mapping Credentials project is a joint effort led by the nonprofit organization Achieving the Dream (ATD) with multiple partners, including OACC, the National Student Clearinghouse, state partners and two Ohio pilot colleges — LCCC and Marion Technical College — to link state higher education data with state employment data and ultimately strengthen educational and workforce outcomes among the state’s community colleges. The project began on July 1, 2023, and has a completion date of September 30, 2025.
“Funded by a grant from the Coleridge Initiative’s Democratizing Our Data Challenge through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Ascendium Education Group, the Mapping Credentials project seeks to create new institution- and system-level dashboards with post-college student outcomes that can be adopted across Ohio’s community colleges to help them bolster social and economic mobility for individuals and their families,” notes a description by ATD. “The hope is that these dashboards will serve as prototypes for institutions and systems in other states.”
Linking programs and workforce outcomes
“Achieving the Dream reached out to us at the start of the Mapping Credentials project to see if we would be interested in participating because they know from working with ATD member institutions like LCCC and others in the state that we’ve really been grappling with how we can better link our higher education and employment outcomes data,” Rittner says. “To us, this seemed like an opportunity to leverage expertise from national organizations and also grant funding to position OACC to bring a solution to the table. Our goal is for the state to invest in sustaining it moving forward.”
The dashboard seeks to illustrate the relationships between college programs and workforce outcomes by tracking post-completion outcomes by program cluster. At the institutional level, the data will help colleges assess the extent to which program offerings and credentials are producing upward economic mobility for individuals and their families, while at the aggregate level, Ohio will be able to assess workforce outcomes across all community colleges and related contributions to the state talent supply, says ATD President and CEO Karen A. Stout.
While the current project is focused on building a prototype for the two Ohio pilot colleges, planning is underway to scale the project to all Ohio community colleges.
“Ensuring strong pathways is essential not only for students’ return on their investments in education but also for their social and economic mobility and the health of the communities in which they live and work upon completion,” Stout says.
If there is a single key takeaway from the Ohio dashboard efforts to date, it is the importance of collaboration among different community colleges and other stakeholders, Benjamin says.
“The key word in the presentation title is ‘together,’” Benjamin says. “We really want to highlight the collaboration of bringing the community colleges and their stakeholders together around being able to accomplish things that we would all be able to learn from and leverage. We want all of them to have input into the design and how things are presented, which is important to give us that collective voice and to present things fairly about the work that we do for our students, what our students look like, and what our students’ outcomes look like.”
He continues: “These are relatively massive undertakings that show that it’s possible even for a team comprised of representatives from 22 colleges, our state association and other partners, to come together to get projects like this off the ground. It’s really exciting.”
