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Board-Level Dashboards

About the Toolkit

As an addendum to our best-practice research on Developing a Data-Driven University, the Forum conducted a collection and analysis of sample Board dashboards and reports to help our members understand what metrics their peers report to the Board of Trustees. Based on these findings, this resource center provides the following resources:

  • Our Insights Brief highlighting key findings on the metrics most frequently reported to the Board, average number of indicators for each functional area, Key Performance Indicators compendium, and more
  • A sample Dashboards and Reports Library, organized by type and size of institution

Methodology

Please note that the data contained in the following dashboards are for demonstration purposes only and do not reflect actual performance. In many instances, data has been modified or redacted to protect the institutions profiled.

Sample dashboards and reports library

Insights Brief: Overview

Given the current financial crisis facing colleges and universities across the country, many higher education administrators have had to field questions from Board members about institutional efficiency and effectiveness. These questions range from “how much does it cost to educate students by discipline?” to “are we efficiently managing administrative resources?” In response to this increased scrutiny, the Roundtable endeavored to collect and analyze the metrics included in Board-level dashboards and reports and answer the question: “what information are other institutions reporting to their Board members?”

This insights brief identifies key findings from our research and includes a Key Performance Indicators compendium based on our review of 36 institutional Board dashboards consisting of over 1,400 metrics. Click here to access the Insights Brief.

Institution-Wide Dashboards and Reports

Cover multiple areas of university performance, including finances and academics.

  • Public Institutions (listed by size)
    Dashboards listed by institution size from smallest to largest.

Northeastern Illinois University

This report consists of a table of measures related to student success, academic excellence, faculty/staff, university operations, and fiscal strength. The report uniquely features a tabular PDF document in which each measure is hyperlinked to a more detailed view that includes a definition, narrative context, frequency of measurement, and a graph of historical performance for that particular measure.

Western Illinois University

  • Dashboard of Progress
  • Student Enrollment: 13,558
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Master’s University (larger program)
  • 49 indicators

On its University Planning Web site, Western Illinois maintains a public dashboard of 49 key indicators divided among three key areas: Educational Demand & Quality, Educational Opportunity, and Affordability & Financial Strength. Each area includes an overview table listing the relevant indicators and whether they are progressing, regressing, or not changing. Users can view data tables and charts for each indicator by clicking links within the overview table.

Binghamton University

  • Performance Metrics
  • Student Enrollment: 13,860
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Research University (high research activity)
  • 48 indicators

This dashboard uses a variety of graph types to display data on campus culture, academic excellence, engagement/outreach, and infrastructure. For charts showing two data sets, the university color-codes the chart titles to the relevant data. This practice leads the reader’s eye to track straight from the title to the relevant data without needing to consult a legend, allowing a large amount of information to fit on a single page without sacrificing readability.

Boise State University

This report, prepared by the provost’s office, uses a combination of narrative and charts to evaluate the institution’s progress toward fulfilling the ten goals of its strategic plan. The narrative clearly lays out the goals of the university’s strategic plan and provides brief anecdotes of exciting developments in each of the four key “destinations” of the strategic plan: Academic Excellence, Public Engagement, Vibrant Culture, and Exceptional Research. The main section of the report contains extensive graphical evidence accompanied by helpful narrative explanations and interpretations of the data.

Oregon State University

  • Dashboard Report
  • Student Enrollment: 19,655
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Medical Doctoral (Canadian)
  • 15 indicators

This annually published dashboard features 12 key institutional metrics, covering student achievement, retention rates, student and faculty demographics, giving, and R&D dollars. The dashboard reports these metrics for the previous five years, marking clearly which metrics are moving in the “right” direction toward institutional goals, and also includes a target for the next five years.

University of Saskatchewan

  • Achievement Record
  • Student Enrollment: 13,558
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Master’s University (larger program)
  • 49 indicators

This six-page document measures 15 indicators across four components of the strategic plan: (1) Teaching, Learning, and the Student Experience, (2) Research, Scholarly, and Artistic Work, (3) Working Together, and (4) An Engaged University.

University of Louisville

This Excel-based scorecard measures the university’s fulfillment of its strategic plan. While many dashboards set only a single target representing the desired level of a given indicator, this forward-looking scorecard assigns each indicator a goal for each of the next five years as well as a longer-range goal for 2020.

University of Connecticut

  • University of Connecticut Metrics
  • Student Enrollment: 22,694
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Research University (very high research activity)
  • 166 indicators

This 27-page document highlights statistics at both institution-wide and college-specific levels regarding undergraduate education, graduate/professional education, research, diversity, resources, and national reputation. The university compares its overall performance to its peers on 11 core metrics and then lists how each individual college performs on those same core metrics, adding college-specific metrics where appropriate. The document features extensive narrative on data sourcing, metric definitions, and additional notes.

Georgia State University

  • Dashboard Trends
  • Student Enrollment: 27,261
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Research University (high research activity)
  • 43 indicators

The university’s dashboard site focuses largely on tabular representations of key data, occasionally supplemented by line graphs for key statistics. Trends are summarized in a one-page table with five years of historical information on students, admissions, instruction, faculty, finance, research, and national rankings. The dashboard trends table is a condensed summary of a larger set of dashboards and performance graphs hosted on the university’s Web site.

Ryerson University

  • Ryerson Performance Indicators
  • Student Enrollment: 33,970
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Primarily Undergraduate (Canadian)
  • 36 indicators

This compilation of indicators relates to four key areas of assessment: Strategic Direction, Financial Capacity, Effective Management, and University Profile (advancement and public relations). The indicators report also includes two pages of narrative regarding the institution’s measurement philosophy. The indicators report demonstrates strong, clear visual representations of data, for example by directly labeling trend lines rather than using legends.

Purdue University

This expansive 77-page report is divided into three sections: (1) a series of color-coded institutional data indicators with hyperlinks to (2) a series of more-detailed data tables and text summaries, and (3) an appendix with explanations of the methodology used to assign colors and trend arrows. Unusual in its extensive narrative depth, this document provides a wealth of information about institutional performance and provides hypotheses to explain the trends the data represents.

University of South Florida

  • Performance Dashboard
  • Student Enrollment: 42,238
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Research University (very high research activity)
  • 8 indicators

The university’s online performance dashboard tracks eight measures: median SAT for first-time students, freshman retention, six-year graduation rate, percentage of students enrolled in study abroad, doctorates awarded, postdoctoral appointees, federal R&D expenditures for science and engineering, and annual giving. The clear, bold visual style and use of both progress-to-goal bar charts and historical line charts provides a large amount of information in an area that can still fit easily inside a single Web browser window.

University System of Maryland

  • Dashboard Indicators
  • Student Enrollment: n/a
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Master’s University (medium program)
  • 79 indicators

This tabular dashboard makes effective use of color-coding to highlight where performance is above and below expectations. Across each institution, the dashboard displays data on a uniform set of measures relating to the overall system strategic plan. The document includes an extensive data dictionary that specifies what each indicator measures, how it is calculated, and its source.

University System of New Hampshire

  • Strategic Indicators
  • Student Enrollment: n/a
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: n/a
  • 18 indicators

This report relies predominantly on extensive narrative on each campus’s performance with occasional tabular data. Each table is pared down to the minimum amount of information necessary, allowing the narrative to carry the story behind the data. This combination of minimal tables and extensive narrative improves readability, a common weakness of tabular dashboards.

  • Private Institutions (listed by size)
    Dashboards listed by institution size from smallest to largest.

Drew University

  • A Dashboard for Drew University
  • Student Enrollment: 2,675
  • Institutional Control: Private
  • Classification: Baccalaureate College: Arts & Sciences
  • 13 indicators

This process document outlines Drew University’s key considerations for its dashboard that is still under development. The document outlines key considerations for the institution’s dashboard, including the need to maintain only a small number of key indicators and remain flexible with adding or removing metrics. While not a full-fledged dashboard, this developmental document provides a useful window on dashboard development at a small private institution.

College of the Holy Cross

  • College-Wide Balanced Scorecard
  • Student Enrollment: 2,745
  • Institutional Control: Private
  • Classification: Baccalaureate College: Arts & Sciences
  • 67 indicators

This Excel-based scorecard displays measures related to three key institutional goals. Indicators range from common measures (retention, graduation, alumni participation, grants) to less commonly tracked metrics like neighborhood engagement, external sustainability ratings, on-campus security incidents, admissions Web site page views, and study abroad participation. The scorecard includes actual figures for the current and two preceding years, as well as a target for the upcoming year.

La Salle University

These two documents highlight metrics related to the university’s strategic goals and potential institutional risks. Each indicator includes a definitional description and historical comparisons. The institutional risks document includes a number of non-traditional measures, including the average age of full-time faculty and whether short-term bridge financing is regularly used in the final quarter of the fiscal year.

Baylor University

  • Dashboard Monitors
  • Student Enrollment: 14,769
  • Institutional Control: Private
  • Classification: Research University (high research activity)
  • 86 indicators

This Excel-based collection of performance indicators tracks financial, human resources, student, athletic, and legal data relative to five years ago, one year ago, and the current period. Notably, the dashboard includes multiple detailed indicators for a single measure type. For example, average class size is represented for 1000-, 2000-, 3000-, and 4000-level classes; debt load for graduating undergraduates is portrayed as average debt, median debt, and percent of students with debt.

University “B”

  • Key Performance Dashboard Indicators
  • Student Enrollment: 10,000-25,000
  • Institutional Control: Private
  • Classification: Research University (very high research activity)
  • 39 Indicators

This excel spreadsheet houses 39 dashboards that address both quality and financial indicators such as admission selectivity, faculty-student ratio, demographic data, tuition discount ratio, S&P and Moody’s financial ratings, voluntary giving, and total gift income activities.

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Finance-Specific Dashboards and Reports

Focus largely on operational financial details and budget matters.

  • Public Institutions (listed by size)
    Dashboards listed by institution size from smallest to largest.

University of Georgia

  • UGA Factbook: Financial Information
  • Student Enrollment: 33,405
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Research University (very high research activity)
  • 206 indicators

The financial section of UGA’s factbook outlines revenues by source, expenditures by function, historical fundraising totals, total research awards, and sponsored awards by project type, sponsor, agency, and major unit. While pie charts and stacked bar graphs provide high-level overviews of data, highly detailed data tables allow readers to conduct more fine-grained analysis and see how individual programs or schools are contributing to a particular overall institutional measure.

University of Colorado

  • Budget Highlights
  • Student Enrollment: 61,176
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Research University (very high research activity)
  • 15 indicators

The University of Colorado presents financial data in a newsletter format that combines narrative, selective graphs, and “at a glance” sidebar statistics. The document highlights pressures and drivers for each budget area and provides terminology definitions where appropriate. The narrative helps clarify what information is being presented and provides explanations for trends presented by the data.

  • Private Institutions (listed by size)
    Dashboards listed by institution size from smallest to largest.

Southern Adventist University

These Excel spreadsheets display key financial health ratios, a balance sheet, and data on revenues, expenditures, auxiliaries, and scholarships. The Board Ratios document contains a number of common higher education ratios as well as some less commonly used ratios such as percentage of possible credit revenue collected.

DePaul University

These single-page tabular reports display data related to cash, investments, debt, leases, revenue, expenditures, and budgeted relative to actual revenue and course credit hours. The school-by-school display of percentage variance from budgeted revenue and credit hours highlights potential capacity issues.

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Academic-Specific Dashboards and Reports

Focus largely on academic matters, such as enrollment, graduation, retention, diversity, faculty characteristics, and student body quality.

  • Public Institutions (listed by size)
    Dashboards listed by institution size from smallest to largest.

The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

This two-page dashboard focuses largely on academic measures, including enrollment by student type, diversity, admissions, retention, graduation, research awards, faculty characteristics, and external rankings. Many of the charts feature a line graph and tabular data along the same time axis, providing a high level of data density without sacrificing readability.

University of Southern Indiana

  • Institutional Snapshot
  • Student Enrollment: 10,050
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Research University (high research activity)
  • 109 indicators

This four-page document highlights institutional details on enrollment, faculty, credit hour generation, degrees awarded, applicant characteristics, and student demographics. The institution provides extensive narrative that calls out trends and factors impacting the data. The last page contains an update on special initiatives, such as the results of a new retention tool and changes to the institution’s strategic plan.

West Virginia University

  • West Virginia University Trends
  • Student Enrollment: 25,255
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Research University (high research activity)
  • 39 indicators

This two-page dashboard displays mostly academic data on tuition and fees, enrollment, degrees granted, entering freshman statistics, credit hours, class size, retention, and transfers. The dashboard also includes some information outside academics, such as employee headcount and revenues.

California State University – Sacramento

  • Academic Measures
  • Student Enrollment: 27,972
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Master’s University (larger program)
  • 39 indicators

This one-page document includes eight academic measures, including general enrollment, one-year retention, four- and six-year graduation rates, first-time freshman admission, student FTEs by college, enrollment by ethnicity, and degrees granted by ethnicity. Bar graphs are labeled with their value, providing a more precise level of data display.

University of Central Florida

  • Performance Dashboard
  • Student Enrollment: 42,465
  • Institutional Control: Public
  • Classification: Research University (high research activity)
  • 8 indicators

This three-page dashboard outlines twelve academic measures including average SAT scores, funding for athletics, total research grants, total fundraising, and six-year graduation rates. Red, yellow, and green lines indicate each year’s target thresholds, allowing readers to see not just how the actual data have changed over time but also how the targets themselves have shifted and become progressively more stringent.

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