Stories & Case Studies
For community colleges, student success is no longer measured by graduation rates alone. Institutions are increasingly expected to understand what happens after students leave college: whether graduates secure jobs that offer living wages and opportunities for upward mobility, and where gaps in postcollege outcomes persist.
Answering those questions requires something many colleges have historically lacked: meaningful access to workforce outcomes data connected to student academic experiences.
In Ohio, a statewide initiative is working to change that.
Through Prosperity for Ohio, Achieving the Dream (ATD), in partnership with the Ohio Association of Community Colleges (OACC), the National Student Clearinghouse, and other key partners, has spent the last two years building the infrastructure needed to help community colleges better understand how academic programs translate into employment and earnings outcomes.
Supported initially by a grant from the Coleridge Initiative’s Democratizing Our Data Challenge and currently by a grant from the Gates Foundation, the initiative is rooted in ATD’s Community Vibrancy Theory of Change, which recognizes that community colleges play a critical role in advancing economic and social mobility for individuals and families resulting in societal gains and overall community prosperity.
Now, with the initiative entering a second phase, the work is moving from foundational pilot work to statewide scaling efforts.
Building the foundation
Launched in 2023, Prosperity for Ohio was designed to securely connect higher education and workforce data in ways that could support more informed institutional decision-making.
Using the Coleridge Initiative’s Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF) as a data repository to link higher education and employment data, the project developed a prototype dashboard, hosted by ATD, that links these data, marking a shift from input-measured systems (enrollment, credits, completion) to outcomes-measured systems (employment, wages, career advancement). The dashboard allows users to examine employment rates and earnings outcomes for graduates at one, three, and five years after completion, with filters for institution; program cluster; demographics, such as race/ethnicity, age, and gender; enrollment type; and other characteristics. It also allows users to compare graduates’ earnings with local living wage standards and with the average earnings of area residents whose highest level of educational attainment is a high school diploma.
In addition, the project sought to address a broader challenge facing many colleges and systems: while workforce outcomes data is increasingly important, obtaining, aligning, and interpreting that data across agencies and institutions can be complex.
Throughout the initial phase of work, ATD and its partners worked through issues related to data definitions, accessibility, privacy protections, suppression rules, and longitudinal reporting structures — lessons that will help inform future expansion efforts both within Ohio and beyond.
Two pilot institutions — Lorain County Community College and Marion Technical College (MTC) — participated in data submissions and providing feedback on the prototype dashboard during the initiative’s first phase. “We are deeply grateful for the considerable time and effort these two colleges dedicated to this important work keeping us anchored in an applied approach to institutional improvement,” said Shara Davis, senior fellow for special projects at ATD.
Throughout the pilot project, participants identified significant potential applications for the tool, including student recruitment, career advising, academic program review, and communications with prospective students, community partners, accreditors, legislators, and others.
Bob Haas, Marion Technical College’s chief strategy officer, notes just some of the ways the dashboard will prove useful. “[It] will enable academic department level managers to easily investigate their graduates’ workforce outcomes to explore possible differences based on demographic factors and implement improvements where warranted,” he explains. “Advising, career services, and admissions staff members will use the dashboard to help students select a career path and understand the potential earnings. Marketing staff will use the dashboard to show the value and ROI of earning a degree at MTC.”
Moving from prototype to statewide scale
In late 2025, Prosperity for Ohio entered a second phase with support from the Gates Foundation. The new phase will expand the initiative across Ohio’s community colleges and focus on helping institutions translate workforce outcomes data into institutional action.
This next chapter represents an important shift in the initiative’s work.
While the initial phase of work focused primarily on aligning complex data systems, developing the prototype dashboard, and learning from the pilot process, the current body of work will scale the dashboard for all Ohio community colleges and will emphasize broader adoption, deeper metrics, advanced usability, and institutional capacity building. For example, the second phase plans to add workforce outcomes for students who transfer and earn a bachelor’s degree as well as add Kentucky data to capture those students who earn a degree in Ohio but are employed across the Ohio river in Kentucky.
According to Lisa Stich, director of data partnerships and strategic data and technology coach at ATD, the broad enthusiasm for participation across Ohio’s community colleges enables the project to capture data reflective of a wide array of institutional contexts, which will contribute to richer, more complex insights. “By bringing together workforce outcomes from community colleges across the state — large and small, urban and rural — we will gain unprecedented insight into how colleges contribute to economic mobility and community vibrancy while accelerating shared learning and expanding the impact of this work,” she says.
The initiative arrives at an important moment for Ohio’s community colleges. In 2025, Ohio adopted a new performance funding metric for community colleges that allocates 5% of state subsidy funding based on workforce outcomes, using the Postsecondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) data as the primary source for those metrics.
Prosperity for Ohio is designed to help institutions respond to that shift in several ways. The project is aligning its workforce outcomes metrics as closely as possible with PSEO definitions to support apples-to-apples comparisons for colleges. At the same time, the dashboard is designed to provide institutions with more actionable and nuanced insights than PSEO alone can offer, including demographic disaggregations and access to more recent workforce outcomes data.
Those additional insights are precisely what participating colleges see as the dashboard’s greatest value. According to Thomas J. Benjamin, vice president of institutional research, data analytics and campus technologies at Lorain County Community College, the dashboard will help institutions move beyond broad employment metrics to better understand workforce outcomes across programs and student populations while informing improvements that strengthen economic mobility. “The Prosperity for Ohio dashboard furthers our understanding of graduate employment outcomes beyond existing data tools,” he asserts. “The disaggregated data provide a deeper understanding of employment and earnings after graduation, including by program of study and socioeconomic status, that will help us design improvements to maximize economic mobility for students.”
Turning data into institutional action
The Prosperity for Ohio dashboard was designed to help colleges translate workforce outcomes data into actionable insights.
By allowing institutions to examine employment and earnings outcomes across student populations and academic programs, the dashboard can help colleges identify opportunities for improvement, strengthen advising, and better understand where upward mobility gaps persist — all of which, according to Davis, are crucial components of community colleges’ obligations in an era when confidence in higher education has eroded.
“We can expect continued emphasis on workforce outcomes and upward mobility as the end goals [of postsecondary education],” she says. “Ohio is no exception. Community colleges understand the realities — as do their external constituents at all levels. The increased pressure to produce strong workforce outcomes, contributing to the state’s talent supply and overall economic development efforts, and the benefits produced for individuals, their families, and the communities served will be paramount for community colleges going forward. We must demonstrate how public investment in higher education translates into economic and social returns for students, local communities, and the state overall.”
As colleges face growing pressure to demonstrate both student success and workforce value, access to actionable workforce outcomes data may become increasingly central to institutional planning, program improvement, and accountability efforts. The project will also focus on building institutional capacity to use the data effectively to create change that enhances economic and social mobility for students in Ohio and beyond.
Potential applications of the insights gleaned from the project’s data include:
- Enabling students to make informed career choices by showing real employment and wage outcomes tied to specific program pathways
- Expanding common language across the institution about what “program success” means (beyond program completion)
- Equipping academic leadership and program review committees with evidence-based data for informed program portfolio and pathway decision-making
- Demonstrating institutional relevance to prospective students, regional employers, workforce boards, economic development partners, legislators and other external constituents
Applying Lessons Beyond Ohio
Although Prosperity for Ohio is focused on Ohio’s community colleges, the initiative was designed from the outset with broader applicability in mind.
One of the project’s goals has been to create a scalable model that other states and systems can learn from as they pursue similar efforts to connect education and workforce outcomes data.
The first phase of the initiative surfaced valuable lessons about data governance, alignment, security protocols, stakeholder engagement, and the realities of building longitudinal workforce reporting systems. Those lessons are now helping shape the scaling efforts and may ultimately help inform similar efforts elsewhere.
To facilitate the transfer of lessons learned in Ohio to other states, the project’s scope of work includes the development of a practical toolkit designed to help colleges use workforce outcomes data effectively in advising, program review, strategic planning, and efforts to strengthen postcollege success for students. The toolkit is intended to help institutions understand the enabling conditions necessary for successful linkage of state agency data and to help them move beyond data access toward integrating insights into decision-making processes across the institution.
As Prosperity for Ohio moves from prototype to statewide implementation, the initiative is demonstrating that workforce outcomes data can be far more than a reporting tool. When paired with the right partnerships, governance, and institutional capacity, those data can help colleges make more informed decisions, strengthen programs and advising, and better understand how higher education contributes to economic mobility and thriving communities. The lessons emerging from Ohio may ultimately help other states build similar systems that translate workforce outcomes data into meaningful action so that we may regain public confidence in higher education through demonstrated return-on- education.
This work was funded by the Gates Foundation. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the Gates Foundation.