Best Practice: Graduate College Dashboard Questions
Graduate College Dashboard: Helping Advance Graduate Programs
The Graduate College Dashboard is a collection of interactive, visual tools that deliver insights into graduate student enrollment, degree resources and program trends to leadership data.
The questions below are meant to be used as a guide for leaders to analyze program priorities, performance, assets and needs. Ultimately, we hope that use of these data collection will inform admissions, enrollment and retention strategies as well as program development.
Admissions trend questions
- What did you learn about the selectivity and yield of your programs? What needs to be adjusted, improved or changed?
- Have you reached capacity? What can be done to increase your capacity to admit more graduate students?
- As your applications increase, are your admit offers increasing by the same margin?
Student enrollment questions
- Review the demographic profile of your graduate programs. Which groups are over and underrepresented? What is noticeable about the demographic profile of your Master’s and Doctoral programs? What would be your ideal student populations?
- What changes/adjustments are needed to improve the demographic profiles of your programs and how could you make such changes? What resources can be leveraged to enhance the diversity of your programs?
- Are you offering support services to students? Which groups are benefiting and/or being ignored? (e.g., male/female, underrepresented groups, international/domestic, etc.)? What kinds of support are you using to ensure student retention?
Student support questions
- How well did your PhD program prepare alumni for their careers?
- What advice would alumni give a student considering enrolling in your PhD program?
- While students pursued your PhD program, how was their dissertation chair/supervisor most useful in supporting career aspirations?
Persistence trends questions
- What trends can you identify for when students drop or withdraw from your program?
- Are there specific days or weeks that students drop or withdraw from your program?
- Are there any proactive actions you can take to retain students before dropping or withdrawing from your program?
Accelerated Master's trends questions
- What changes/adjustments are needed to increase student enrollment in Accelerated Master's programs?
- Does your program have approved Accelerated Master's with no students currently enrolled? What steps are you taking to address this?