Episode 95: Peggy McCready on How Tech Data Enables Student Success
How can technology not only help students create, collaborate, and communicate but also provide valuable data about what they need? How can institutions curb the digital sprawl, redundant systems, and siloed data that stem from their decentralized structures? How can your strategy help you prioritize and combine communications, training, and support? We dive into this with Peggy McCready, an AVP for Information Technology at Colorado State University.
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In the modern higher education landscape, the conversation is shifting. It’s no longer just about the shiny new software or the latest hardware rollout; it’s about the data those tools provide and how that information translates into student achievement. For leaders in information technology, the challenge isn’t just providing a platform—it’s ensuring that technology acts as a bridge rather than a barrier.
Peggy McCready, Associate Vice President for Information Technology at Colorado State University, recently joined the Connected College Podcast to share her insights from over 20 years of experience at institutions like Yale, NYU, and Oxford. Her message is clear: To truly support the "whole student," colleges must move past decentralized silos and embrace a comprehensive, data-driven strategy.
Top Keywords: Student Success Strategy, Higher Ed Technology Trends, Digital Sprawl
Defining Student Success in a Modern Context
Historically, the metric for success was simple: degree completion. While graduating is still a primary goal, McCready argues that the definition has expanded significantly. Today’s institutions are looking at a broader range of outcomes, including:
Meaningful Employment: Are students finding jobs within six months of graduation?
Civic Responsibility: Are graduates engaged with their communities and practicing service learning?
The Power of the Network: Is the institution providing the social capital and professional networks necessary for long-term growth?
By looking at the "whole student experience," technology leaders can better align their IT investments with the actual needs of the diverse populations they serve, from first-generation students to international learners.
Overcoming the "Digital Sprawl" and Siloed Data
One of the most significant hurdles in higher education is the decentralized nature of large research universities. This often leads to "digital sprawl"—a chaotic accumulation of redundant systems, multiple student portals, and overlapping learning management systems (LMS).
When a student has to navigate three different platforms just to find their coursework or access advising, the technology becomes a barrier. McCready suggests that the first step to fixing this is a thorough inventory of existing tools. By identifying redundancies, institutions can streamline the student experience and, perhaps more importantly, consolidate their data.
When data is siloed across different systems, it becomes nearly impossible to get a clear picture of where students are struggling. Streamlining tools allows for better analytics, which helps deans, department chairs, and faculty make informed decisions.
Proactive Support Through Data and Analytics
The shift from focusing on technology to focusing on data allows institutions to be proactive rather than reactive. Instead of waiting for a student to fail a midterm, schools can use data to identify patterns of struggle early on.
For example, if the data shows a high volume of help-desk tickets or questions regarding a specific resource, the university can develop an orientation program or a "virtual one-stop shop" to address those needs before they become a crisis. Chatbots and information architecture aren't just IT projects; they are student success interventions that help learners navigate the complex university landscape.
Implementing a Comprehensive Student Success Strategy
So, how do leaders move from a piecemeal approach to a cohesive vision? McCready outlines several key ingredients for a successful student success strategy:
Executive Sponsorship: You need top-down buy-in to remove obstacles and align university resources.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: A successful team should include voices from IT, wellness, academics, and advising.
Measured Goals: Avoid the trap of setting 25 different goals. Focus on the top three to five high-impact objectives that can be measured and communicated.
Continuous Assessment: The work is never done. Ongoing assessment ensures that the tools and practices in place today still serve the students of tomorrow.
Conclusion: Putting People First
Ultimately, the most important element of any technological shift is the people. Technology is the means, but student success is the end. By fostering a culture of experimentation—using pilots to test new ideas like lecture capture or active learning classrooms—and prioritizing clear communication and training, institutions can ensure that their digital transformation actually leads to better student outcomes.
Episode 95 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers. Welcome, Peggy. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in technology and higher ed.
Peggy: Hi. So I've been working in higher education for over 20 years. I actually got started at Temple University in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And at the time there was a lot of change happening with technology, not just the business processes but also technology being introduced in the classroom. I think I was the youngest person on staff, and so therefore I became responsible for all technologies at the branch campus.
Peggy: In terms of my passion and where I was most curious was really watching what was happening with the distance learning or the online education and how students who didn't have a chance to complete their education previously could now all of a sudden participate. I also, as a graduate student, was taking courses at Temple and I drove four hours every Thursday from Harrisburg to Philadelphia to take a class. So that factor was life-changing when you think about it. Just making those courses available to more individuals who were working full-time.
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Elliot Felix: How do you define student success?
Peggy: It's interesting, I think as a graduate student in higher education both at Harvard and at Penn, student success is something that we talked about quite a lot. The very first thing that comes to mind is degree completion. And whether that's an associate's degree or bachelor's degree, it doesn't matter, but it's degree completion. I think the first step is if you're thinking about what do the students need to be able to get to completing their degree, but then it expands beyond that.
Peggy: We're starting to see other institutions reporting on how many of their students are employed six months after graduation. The purpose of the degree often is to find meaningful employment and institutions wanna be able to show that is indeed happening. I think that data matters from the consumer's perspective. There are a lot of other things that go into it—the network that students have access to, the skills that help them understand how to be more engaged with a community, and that civic responsibility. It’s the whole student experience.
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Elliot Felix: Now, what role does technology play in enabling that student success?
Peggy: I think it plays a very important role and I think it can be a barrier, if not careful. Something that became even more noticeable during the pandemic was the digital divide. If not careful, technology can be a barrier for students in rural areas, first generation, and low income students.
Peggy: Beyond that, large research universities are often very decentralized. The biggest challenge for the students is figuring out where to go, and often they get shuffled around from place to place and they just give up. I've seen institutions that had multiple student portals, which was not a good place to be. You need a higher level strategy for all the tools that are coming together to support student success and helping the students understand how those tools work together.
Elliot Felix: Higher ed tends to be an additive culture. A need is identified, and so you add a tool, but then digital sprawl happens. What can institutions do to curb that?
Peggy: The first step is really understanding what are the tools that you have in place today and are there any redundancies. As a student myself, I had two LMSs I had to use at a particular institution because the schools were using different systems. If there is any overlap in functionality, maybe you can reduce the number of tools and streamline. It makes it less challenging from a support perspective and a student experience perspective.
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Peggy: It feels like the conversation has become more about data than technology to me. I understand it's technology that allows you to have the data. And it's having that understanding of, okay, if we know what questions the students are asking, how can we be better prepared to support them in the future?
Peggy: Whether you're developing maybe an orientation program around an area where you see that students are struggling—more and more institutions are using the data to help them understand the programming and the resources that students need most to be successful. Often that's like first-year students who are new to the college environment.
Elliot Felix: It's like making sure you're not confusing the means with the end. The technology is there to help and support students, but it's also there to tell you what help and support they need.
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Elliot Felix: What are the ingredients for a successful student success strategy?
Peggy: I think I would say where you have executive sponsorship—that balance between the top down and the bottom up. You have executive sponsors who are bringing people together from across the institution and they're aligning the university's resources. But that collaboration has to occur with a diverse group of people representing key areas in a student's journey: technology, wellness, and the academic advising side.
Peggy: At the end of the day, it's goals that can be measured. Picking your top five or your top ten and focusing on those and communicating out broadly to the entire university about your progress. Also, having a structure and a process for IT governance is important because institutions are not gonna have the resources to do everything they want to do. You have to make tough decisions about priorities with transparency and collaboration.
Elliot Felix: Well, Peggy, thanks so much. This is a great conversation about the role of tech and student success and really appreciate your insights.
Peggy: Thank you for the opportunity. It was a lot of fun.