Developing Budget Dashboards & Exploring Student Success Metrics

In the Fall semester, the Office of Research, Planning, and Institutional Effectiveness focused on the development of Budget Dashboards to extend greater transparency of budget allocations, expenditures, and oversight. The office also contributed to the Student Equity and Achievement report and the ACCJC Midterm report, which provided a great vantage point in identifying opportunities to maximize funding within the Student-Centered Funding Formula (SCFF) and Student Equity and Achievement (SEA) Program.

The newly developed Budget Dashboards are still in draft form until formally vetted through the shared governed process this spring. Once approved by the Budget Committee the dashboards will be placed on the committee’s website for collegewide access. Budgetary competence is a high priority for the College of Alameda and the creation of Budget Dashboards aligns with College Goal 4, “Engage in transparent and data-driven decision-making process to best leverage resources to meet students’ needs and future workforce and community demands”. To create the greatest visibility into our budget multiple dashboards were created to provide retrospective details and existing balance, expenses, and projects for all departments, disciplines, and projects.

Below is a snapshot of the dashboard with 4 years of budget balances and expenses for the President’s Office.

The dashboard below shows the last 4 years of budget balances and expenses by department, discipline, or project. This dashboard will inform future budget allocations. Furthermore, this dashboard will illuminate budget efficiency opportunities and needs in different departments or disciplines.

The next two dashboards reflect the current year’s budget. Each dashboard is a different fund. The two examples shown are Fund 1 and Fund 11. In the dashboard reflecting Fund 1, the expenses and balances are the current budget. Fund 1 only has Department and Discipline filters.

Here is the second example of a current budget dashboard for Fund 11 below. This dashboard can be filtered by project. In the figures, the Student Equity and Achievement (SEA) Program shows expenses and available balance for the current year. This dashboard will help managers monitor their project spending and help with reporting expenditures.

When talking about the budget, we must also look at SCFF. The data used in the SCFF is also used in other data reporting (i.e., Vision 2030, SEA, Midterm Report). In review of reporting, some intriguing positive data was observed. We are performing well in student success metrics and the outcomes celebration-worthy.

In Vision 2030, we met our goals for Pell Grants and Promise Grant Recipients. Financial Aid has been doing an amazing job making sure students are applying to the FASFA and DREAM Act. This is a remarkable success for our students, but also Pell Grant Recipients are counted twice in the success metrics in the SCFF giving us more funds in the future.

Another Student Success Metric included in the SCFF, and our midterm report is our Students Count of Transfers. We have been exceeding our set standards for students who transfer to a 4-year university shown in the figure below from the midterm report. Furthermore, when you take the SCFF definition the percentage of students who a transferring to a 4-year university we excel above all the other schools in our district and statewide. So, for the number of students, we have a higher percentage of students who are transferring out of a 4-year university.

Additionally, when you look at SEA’s definition for transferring students within a 3-year period. We are still excelling in this metric.

As shown in this figure, we have been doing extremely well with our 3-Year Cohort Transferring Students to a 4-Year University. We surpassed the statewide percentage in 2019-2020. We dipped after that year but recovered the following year.

A point of pride is the student success metric related to the Completion of Math and English in the first year. We were above the statewide percentage for multiple years but had a small decline in the last two years. College of Alameda recognizes higher performance on this metric increases our funding opportunities under SCFF and SEA.

College of Alameda will continue striving for excellence in student success metrics. Providing budget transparency through our newly developed dashboards allows the college community to make data-driven decisions to advance our students and communities today their educational and career goals.