As policymakers explore options for building California’s first early education to workforce longitudinal data system, local initiatives to improve outcomes through data collection and analysis offer important takeaways.

In 2013, the University of California Riverside formed the Graduation Rate Task Force to improve the four-year graduation rate. At that time, only 42% of UC Riverside students earned a degree in four years, the lowest rate in the UC system. The taskforce used multiple sources of data and campus resources to clarify problems, identify opportunities, and roll out interventions.

Drawing from interviews and publicly available documents, this brief from California Competes explores how UC Riverside used data as a strategy to facilitate conversation and collaboration on campus to improve completion rates and reduce time to degree. College Futures Foundation provided a grant to support this work.

Read From Policy to Practice: How Institutions Leverage Data to Improve Outcomes to learn how leaders can use data to modernize institutional practices and inform continuous improvement.