Company: University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Company background: UNLV is a public, urban research institution that holds the nation’s highest recognition for both research and community engagement from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching – R1, the gold standard for research institutions. These distinctions underscore UNLV’s vision to become one of the nation’s premier public universities for research, education, and community impact.
UNLV research is central to Nevada’s economic renaissance, increasing the availability of good-paying jobs and the secondary industries that support them. We put our expertise to work through projects and partnerships that solve challenges, create opportunities, and answer the profound questions of our time. UNLV research also directly translates to teaching, elevating student learning and bringing context to issues facing our state, nation, and world.
UNLV is focused on success for its students, from orientation, through their time on campus, and into their chosen careers. This includes a vibrant Honors College, access to academic and career advising, and an innovative curriculum that is responsive to workforce needs and focused on career readiness.
An array of internship and research opportunities also strengthens the academic experience, allowing students to engage directly with industry leaders and tackle pressing real-world issues alongside some of the world’s leading experts.
Accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, UNLV is committed to equity and inclusion throughout its operations and meets federal Minority Serving Institution requirements as an Asian American, Native American and Pacific Islander-Serving Institution, and as a Hispanic-Serving Institution.
UNLV’s Top Tier 2.0 Mission
As a minority-serving institution rich with diversity and committed to equity, UNLV:
provides access to world-class educational experiences that are responsive to the needs of our students and stakeholders;
engages in groundbreaking research, scholarship, professional, and creative activities that have impact and cross boundaries; and
offers high-value, cutting-edge interdisciplinary physical and mental health care to support our community.
We create value for the individuals and communities we serve by fostering a climate of innovation, stimulating economic diversification and workforce development, promoting social justice and inclusion of all voices, and enriching cultural vitality.
Contact: John (Skip) Crooker, Ph.D.
Title: Vice Provost
Country: USA
Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver
Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve?
Researchers have consistently found that disparities in student success persist across ethnic and racial groups (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018; Roberts et al., 2021). Being one of the most diverse campuses in the nation as approximately 70% of our student body identifies as belonging to racial and ethnic minority groups, eliminating achievement gaps is a priority for our campus. Our institution actively engaged in the Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Data Institute during the spring of 2023 and also participated in the Raise the Bar Summit in the summer of the same year. These forums shared a common theme, emphasizing the importance of disaggregating student success metrics by race and ethnicity.
To bridge the equity performance gaps and promote student success, it is essential for us to identify student outcome gaps by student demographics, such as race/ethnicity, Pell status, first-generation status, and gender. Additionally, many grant opportunities that our Faculty and researchers are pursuing are related to STEM fields. These funding sources are frequently interested in disaggregated student performance particularly as achievement gaps across racial groups tend to be the most severe in STEM disciplines.
Research in the field of higher education has acknowledged that racially minoritized groups and other disadvantaged students are consistently underserved. In order to be intentional in ensuring equity in outcomes across student demographic groups, we must identify and measure these gaps and seek strategic plans. By measuring the gaps in performance, we find that we will have an instrument to benchmark progress and select the policies that provide the biggest return to our efforts.
With the dedicated support of the SAS Customer Success team and through collaboration with the Division of Diversity Initiatives, the MSI Task Force, and MSI Data and Assessment Subcommittee, the Office of Decision Support at University of Nevada, Las Vegas dedicated its entire team to build a comprehensive equity dashboard. This project is aligned with the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts on campus and advancing student success initiatives.
How did you use SAS to solve that business problem? What products did you use and how did you use them?
We recently adopted SAS Viya for our Business Intelligence reporting across campus. We took advantage of SAS Training opportunities to boost our abilities at developing Dashboards for our campus decision makers. SAS Viya provided us with a plethora of options to create informative and detailed visuals. The ability of our users to filter and drill down to the academic department and course level for a specific student group allows them to quickly focus on student performance in their units. SAS enables our student data to speak.
This innovative approach to integrating equity dashboards into a centralized platform helped facilitate efficient data organization and dissemination to support diversity-related initiatives and metrics. We were able to combine efforts with key campus units, seeking data-informed solutions, to develop equity dashboards, fostering a collaborative environment for knowledge sharing. Improved access to data helps promote transparency in evaluating metrics and progress towards goals, and helps ensure informed and responsible decision-making.
The distinctive complexity, volume, and structure of data serve as an exceptional source of insights for individuals dedicated to advancing equity and inclusion on our campus.
What were the results or outcomes?
We constructed a robust, dynamic series of dashboards that allows our campus users to filter student outcomes across four metrics. These metrics include Course completion rates, Cumulative GPA, Retention Rates, and Graduation Rates for both the graduate and undergraduate level. These dashboards are allowing us to benchmark our students' outcomes and measure the impact of new programs and policies to serve students.
Why is this approach innovative?
For a long time, institutions have failed to disaggregate student outcomes data by race/ethnicity. Additionally, nationally reported IPEDS race and ethnicity data contains a category for multiple race and ethnicity which aggregates data resulting in an incomplete picture of true race and ethnicity counts. In our experience, we noticed that our AANAPISI student counts were declining as a result of students increasingly choosing multiple race/ethnicity IPEDS category even though our campus has been proving us opposite and a very diverse student body.
We recently partnered with Excelencia in Education as we are a Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI). Our work with Excelencia has signaled to us the importance of disaggregation and ability to record true counts of our student's ethnicity and race.
What advice would you give to new SAS users?
We found that by creating reports in SAS Viya that were based on reports we had created before the implementation allowed us to learn our new structure in SAS while having a thorough understanding of the data. We also found that it is important to explore the tools available in SAS.
