The Prosperity for Ohio initiative is a joint effort between Achieving the Dream, the Ohio Association of Community Colleges, and the National Student Clearinghouse to link state higher education data with state employment data to promote data-informed decision-making about each college’s programs and student success beyond college. The project began on July 1, 2023, and will be completed by March 31, 2025.
Funded by a grant from the Coleridge Initiative’s Democratizing Our Data Challenge through Ascendium Education Group, Prosperity for Ohio 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 attract and advise students and identify and redesign programs to bolster social and economic mobility. The hope is that these dashboards will serve as prototypes for institutions and systems in other states.
Why it Matters
Colleges are becoming increasingly aware that their end goal is not just the attainment of a degree or credential by their students but increasing their students’ economic and social mobility. To do this, colleges must drive student success, eliminate inequities, and keep student debt down. This work requires an understanding of the relationships between college programs and workforce outcomes. In other words, post-graduation earnings must be tracked by program or program cluster. Data gleaned from this tracking has the power to:
- Inform program decision-making and improvements in college offerings in alignment with the regional labor market that lead to stronger upward mobility for graduates
- Improve career guidance and planning for students
- Ensure academic program learning outcomes align with employer requirements
Key Goals
Prosperity for Ohio has three overarching objectives:
- Create a prototype of new institution- and system-level dashboards of post-college outcomes using data from two Ohio pilot institutions
- Create a sustainability and scalability plan for growing adoption across the Ohio community college system and for adoption by other institutions and states
- Build the capacity of community colleges to use workforce data in the dashboards to attract and advise students as well as identify and redesign programs to bolster economic returns for students
Participating Colleges
Lorain County Community College and Marion Technical College are serving as pilot institutions for the initiative.
It is possible that, as the project proceeds, we will accept additional prototype partners if we have the capacity to do so. That decision will not be made until late 2024. Please note that all prototype partners must already participate in the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP).
Our Partners
Achieving the Dream serves as the lead in managing Prosperity for Ohio initiative and in performing the work. In addition to the participating pilot colleges, we have other key partners:
- Ohio Association of Community Colleges: Will help inform the design of the functionality requirements of the prototype dashboards by bringing stakeholders together, support the prototyping process, and contribute significantly to the scaling and sustainability plan.
- National Student Clearinghouse: Houses the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP), which serves as a source of college student/degree data. As such, it serves as a key source data expert.
- Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services: Submits data to the Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF), which serves as a source of labor market data, and serves as a key source data expert.
- Vantage Point Consulting: Is the technology partner contracted to support dashboard ideation and creation
If you have questions about the Prosperity for Ohio initiative, please check out our FAQ