INDIANAPOLIS — A plenary discussion at the close of the 2011 Achieving the Dream (ATD) Strategy Institute on Friday was dominated by two 
topics: community colleges’ important role in addressing the nation’s workforce development needs and their role in ensuring the availability of public higher education.
Carol Lincoln, senior vice president of ATD Inc., urged ATD college leaders to set institutional completion goals to help produce their colleges’ share of the national goal of 5 million additional community college graduates by 2020. The 130 ATD colleges use data to develop strategies to close achievement gaps and increase the attainment of certificates and degrees.
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In a rousing address, a university president—who is also a mathematician—urged participants of the annual Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Principal Investigators conference
this week to rethink their approaches to teaching math and science in order to raise the competence of all Americans in these subjects.
“Our challenge, colleagues, is to help Americans get over their fear of math and science,” said Freeman Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), who recently led the National Academies of Science committee that wrote on expanding science and technology opportunities for minorities.
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To Karen Stout, president of Montgomery County Community College (MCCC) in Pennsylvania, better data leads to greater institutional effectiveness. It has also helped add more than $10 million to her college’s bottom line.
Although MCCC already participates in two national data collection mechanisms in addition to the U.S. Education Department’s
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, Stout welcomes the more-detailed internal look at her college and the peer-to-peer comparative data she expects the Volunteer Framework of Accountability to deliver.
“For me, as a college president, it (statistical information) is a leadership tool. It makes it possible for me to go beyond the anecdotal,” Stout said.
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Daniel Bain, president of Independence Community College (ICC) in Kansas, anticipates that the Voluntary Framework of Accountability that is currently being developed will help his one-person institutional research (IR) department rather than burden it.
IR at ICC is actually one of the many duties of the director of institutional effectiveness and retention. The director would repurpose information the college already collects for the
Kansas Board of Regents and the Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQIP), which is part of the college’s accreditation process.
