The American Association of Community Colleges’ Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA) can be a powerful tool for colleges to drive institutional improvement. Knowing where to start or what to concentrate on can be daunting. These steps can help better use the VFA for your college.
Focus on the right students. The VFA provides different lenses to look at students who attend your institution. By understanding who you are serving, and differences in outcomes in different groups, your college will be better able to target interventions and institutional improvement.
For example, your college may want to better understand differences between traditional-aged students and returning adult students, or differentiate between credential-seeking and all other students attending the college. The VFA allows colleges to understand a wide range of student outcomes for different types of students to allow a better understanding of where to focus institutional attention.
Understanding leading indicators. The VFA six-year outcomes are an excellent tool for understanding what happened to students at your institution, but do not provide much information on where to intervene. The VFA provides an array of earlier/leading indicators that will allow a college to better understand where to intervene.
The VFA is incorporating even more leading indicators — first-term and first-year metrics — which combined with developmental progress and two-year progress metrics will provide a rich set of information student progress that are aligned with future success.
This article comes from the current issue of AACC’s Community College Journal.
Use internal benchmarks. By participating in the VFA, colleges can view their data, consistently reported over time, to track improvement. The VFA can be used to share data within the college and track how well a college is doing at meeting improvement goals. These metrics can be embedded in strategic plans, intervention plans or even accreditation reports.
Use external benchmarks. The VFA provides colleges with an ability to compare their outcomes with peer institutions. Colleges can select institutions that are similar across the country to compare their long-term and short-term student progress and outcomes.
While some state systems will allow benchmarking within a state, it may be more appropriate to compare with colleges outside the state to get a better handle on how well the college is doing in a variety of areas.
Advocate for your college. The VFA provides data that is nationally accepted, consistently defined and aligned with community college mission. As a result, it allows colleges to more appropriately tell the story of student outcomes and progress to external stakeholders.
Hidden in the data: Success rates for full-time community college students look brighter.
Colleges can use the data that are appropriate to their mission, and present their data in a way that more accurately tells their story by including a more comprehensive set of students, and more outcomes than other national or federal data.
Have courageous conversations. The VFA arms colleges with data they can use to drive change with courageous conversations. Because the data definitions are accepted nationally, colleges can share data, such as disparities in progress on developmental education metrics, with faculty and administrators to have a conversation about topics that might otherwise be ignored. These conversations can lead to staff and faculty re-examining how things are done, and identify potential changes to improve student outcomes.
AACC hosts several free webinars focused on the VFA in June and July.
