Vital Signs
Equity Scorecard™ - The Vital Signs
The Vital Signs is a tool that provides a visual representation of the starting point when investigating system or college equity. It breaks down large data sets into smaller, disaggregated ones and presents them in an accessible manner. In other words, it provides a snapshot of “baseline” or current student performance.
The baseline data on student outcomes examines three perspectives:
These data allow faculty members, counselors, administrators, and others to see where inequities are occurring. They draw attention to issues where policy makers and educators must intervene to produce equity in educational outcomes for underserved populations.
Each perspective has several standard indicators, selected to represent key points of student progression. For example, in Access, indicators can include the total number of applications submitted by fulltime students, the total number of fulltime students admitted and the total number of such students who enrolled.
The Vital Signs, illustrated here for the Access perspective, provide a snapshot of “baseline” or current performance data.
Campus Effort
Once systems and campuses identify inequities in their Vital Signs data for each of the three perspectives, the evidence team begins to prioritize the areas requiring Campus Effort that will reduce inequities in student access, retention, and excellence and completion.
Examples of such efforts include: availability of and access to academic resources; hiring patterns for faculty, staff and administrators; and ways in which merit-based scholarships are distributed.
Each evidence team selects its own indicators to describe campus efforts and will assess their effectiveness in serving the needs of particular student populations.