C.J. BISHOP: So thank you all, I'm going to start my screen and then we will-- I'll share my screen then we'll start doing the round introduction to the presenters. And then we will be on the road. Let's see. Does everybody see-- let's see, there's a highlight. Do we see, Visualizing and Mapping Enrollment Equity Gaps?

Stephanie Feger: Yes. It looks good, C.J.

C.J. BISHOP: All right. Perfect. Well, this is just to make sure you're in the right spot. That's what we're doing here. We're visualizing and mapping enrollment and equity gaps in community colleges. I will show you who is presenting with me so that you can kind of get a framing of how we came about doing this. And hopefully, it's a tool or resource that you can apply to your institutions or it can expand into that.

Stephanie Feger: Yeah. So just to jump in here. Stephanie Feger from Coast Community College District. And we know that these kinds of tools, maps, and apps are really out there and being used a lot. We all use them every day in multiple ways. They're very visually appealing and can inform us in so many different ways.

But our journey and our question was really, how can we start using these to advance social and economic mobility, as well as address some of the enrollment challenges that we have at our institutions? And ultimately, help students get on career paths that are going to be getting them to living wage jobs. So glad to be here joining you from Orange County.

C.J. BISHOP: And just to give a little chime in for myself. My name is C.J. Bishop. I work with Stephanie at Coast Community College District in Orange County in Costa Mesa. And we had work with this project. In partnership, in the huge help was really working with the work already established and the insight and direction at Orange Coast College. Huge thanks to Dr. Sheri Sterner who assisted us and continues to help guide us in that.

Sheri Sterner: Great. And then as myself. My name is Sheri Sterner, I'm the Dean of Research Planning and institutional Effectiveness. Orange Coast is one of the three colleges in the Coast Community College District. And we were very excited to partner with C.J. and Stephanie on this project. So it has been very important for our office.

C.J. BISHOP: Thank you.

Sheri Sterner: And our colleagues, I should say.

C.J. BISHOP: All right. So we're just going to start getting a little framing as far as the region and everything going on.

Stephanie Feger: Yeah. So this is some of the data that we pulled together for our plan, our three-year plan. And we're really looking here at some of the gaps for some of the significant populations that we serve. And I think as we all know,higher education took a big hit during the pandemic. And particularly, the decline in enrollment at community colleges.

But some of the biggest gaps that we experienced were among adult learners, first generation students, students of color. And this is some of the data that we have that we're really trying to tackle in terms of addressing gaps. So first, for English learners, 18% of adults 18 years and older in our region are classified as English learners. But our consortium is only serving 5% of this population in the last year.

Similarly, with high school and GED, 10% of adults have earned less than a high school diploma, but only just above 1% of those were served. And finally, another population adult with disabilities. So just over 1% of the almost 70,000 adults with disabilities in our region were served. So what we really know here is that based on this data, we really want to align our plan with some of the goals that we need to achieve to be able to address the impacts with these individuals.

And so these include things like better meeting the regional needs by addressing these gaps and services. I think that's the highlight here. But also ensuring more seamless transitions to secondary education in the workforce, as well as expanding and refining some of the student acceleration opportunities that we have, particularly, with students that have not completed high school.

And then I think a big piece of the work that we're trying to do is leverage partners and community resources to really understand what are some of the needs and how we can partner to address some of the needs of students in our region.

C.J. BISHOP: To get a framing, because I'm not sure how familiar is everybody within the region, but we're, again, we're in Orange County in Southern California. What we want to do is provide a perspective of educational attainment and really where the discrepancies really do exist with communities that ourselves and the various colleges that we work with are trying to serve.

Despite looking down here with the age of 25 or older, the bachelor's degree or higher is quite prevalent in Orange County with 41.2%, but despite that, we show there's a growing need in special communities, especially, those adult learners that do need either some additional help with the transitional, especially, the post-high school or those less than high school.

But for us, it's really a framing of how do we best get at that data and best understand it. We see these large pictures. And that's really where we start exploring geospatial information. Not only better understanding what of those communities that we currently serving, but who are we not serving. And really, where are areas that we can provide better outreach.

By understanding where increased gaps exist, especially, in these areas of educational need. Another key aspect that we want to explore is just the demographics within our region. So this is within Orange County. So we looked at the census data between 2010 and 2020. We're doing comparison of the two demographic changes or the demographic changes between the decades. We're definitely seeing an increase within our area of Asian and Latinx population, as well as those over 18.

Orange County is one of the fastest growing and aging communities. So that's important for us to consideration. And also because of that, we are dropping in those under 18, and then also the predominant demographic of white is also starting to decrease as well. So as we look at these, and again, a broad picture, we started to determine what are best ways we can form this data into questions of the community data, our own data, and how can we use a different geospatial strategy to really guide us to next steps in better understanding and better serving our communities?

Stephanie Feger: So the challenge-- I think this is a challenge that many probably on the Zoom meeting are having, is really addressing some of the enrollment declines. But it's really equated with the changes in demographics. So we met with Sheri, some of our colleagues at Orange Coast College. And really started to nail down some of these questions to get more specific about understanding our population so we can address those needs and those gaps.

Sheri Sterner: Yeah. And these were some of the key questions that we formulated at the beginning of our partnership with our district colleagues-- Stephanie and C.J. And to give you a perspective on Orange Coast, we are, I would say, a mid-size community college. We used to be a larger-sized community college. We're serving about-- just depending on when we count our students, between 17,000 and 18,000 students headcount per semester.

That's down from 25,000 or 26,000 10 to 15 years ago. So we have had a decline in enrollment at Orange Coast pre-pandemic. The pandemic just amplified and accelerated that decline. The other thing that is-- what I will say is somewhat unique about Orange Coast College as a community college is we have one of the youngest student enrollment populations when we look across the state.

Our average age is about 24. But just about 45% to 46% of our students are under 21. A lot of those students in that category are coming directly from high school. And so when we look at our student population, and knowing also the reality in our geographic region, that we are not producing increasing numbers of high school graduates. It really was at the top of our focus to say, we need to really look at how we're serving our community. And how are we serving those additional populations of adult learners outside of those that are just coming straight from high school?

And so we had some real critical work that preceded developing these key questions. And I'll just read two of our new college objectives. We underwent a very extensive master planning effort. And under our college goal community, we indicated that we wanted to, in our objective 3, strategically identify, develop, and expand higher education, K-12 and industry partners, to first foster an inclusive culture and successful career pathways for students.

And then we had our fourth objective, which was expand instructional and support programs and services that encourage and uplift undeserved and disenfranchised populations in the community. So with that, we knew we needed to change how we looked at our data. We needed to change the dialogues and decision making that we had on campus.

And these were the key questions that really drove us forward. And we wanted to make sure that we had an equity forward approach to this, because we know over the past 15 to 20 years, our student base has changed dramatically. We went away from a white majority students to a majority non-white students with our Hispanic and Latinx population growing at really a rapid rate. So we knew we needed to do a little re-envisioning of how we support our community and our students. So I think we can move on.

C.J. BISHOP: Real quick. Just to nerd out real quick. So one thing. We started looking at teasing at the maps. We've got-- really, the orange star is reflecting where OCC is at. And we did this as an example of the census tracts, and we're really where the highest Ed level was high school for adult learners.

So we're seeing with the areas that are darker blue, really the opportunities of how do we best know what the needs are in those communities and really where OCC and other partners can go into. So just wanted to highlight that real quick. Let me go into the next slide.

Sheri Sterner: So as we started to talk about and we initially had this conversation with our executive leadership team, which would be our president's cabinet. Our president, our vice president, and then key members that report to the president directly. Myself, our marketing director, as well as our human resource director.

So we had this team that was really tackling this and saying, how do we kick start our educational master planning implementation in these areas? And we knew that we needed to have a more intentional and direct focus on really our geographic region in terms of our service area. I'll talk in our next slide about the data that we have. We have a lot of data about our students, we have other data about our community.

But we really needed to bring that data together in a view that was easy to understand and where we could marry and match that information together to show us the full picture. And again, we knew we needed something that had an intentional and direct focus. And I think you'll see the second point.

We knew that we needed it in a different format. Just looking at numbers and percentages gives us an idea, but it really doesn't map out the layout and the communities, and understanding specific communities via census tract. And where we need to maybe focus a little better. So that was really an impetus to work with C.J. and Stephanie to really bring our data to life and our community to life.

I think we can move forward. So this is where we started. I think I've talked a little bit about this. We have very robust data at our institution. We have regular, even daily updates of enrollment trends, we can look and see how that is happening across key enrollment metrics across the institution down to our departments and our courses. And we engage our stakeholders at the college. And looking at that data, analyzing that data, and really bringing it to life for their departments or areas.

So we've known where our difficulties have been. We also commonly look at our student demographics, and you can see our student profile dashboard that we have. Really, allows the institution, our departments, even down to courses our student attributes where those trends are how our students are changing.

But when we look-- and we also have success data and all of that. This is just an illustration. So we had a lot of data on our students. We also had data on our communities. But we felt like, do these tools really tell us the full story? And when we really look at our students versus our community, are we serving our community? Do we have a full grasp if we look at that through an equity lens through the different populations.

And also the needs of those populations. One of the items that we at Orange Coast have focused on pre-pandemic, which it was really, again, amplified during the pandemic was our student basic needs. Our students have been growing, I would say, over the past five-ish years in having basic needs, growing basic needs issues with mental health, with financial, with food insecurity, housing insecurity. And we've been starting to address that with our students.

But we're also wondering, what is the extent that those are barriers out in the community? And can we work with our community better to help-- since we have such robust services on campus, can we help meet some of those barriers in our community, and really facilitate members in our adult learners in our community coming to Orange Coast through that? Knowing that we have the ability to help with those needs.

So again, we took immediate action with our executive leadership team. We said we need to use these geospatial tools to help us see the data, understand those trends of Orange Coast, and barriers of our local community. Again, with an equity lens so that we are looking at that across populations. Because we know the different populations of our students and those in the community don't all have the same needs.

C.J. BISHOP: Thanks, Sheri.

Sheri Sterner: Yeah.

C.J. BISHOP: So getting into the mapping fund. So just to get a perspective of our geospatial strategy is, we used internal data and we start broad. So I'm going to show you a screenshot and I'll bring up the actual map. And we basically, just based on location in relation to OCC, there's interest of three primary groups within the academic year. We did 2020-'21. And it was, those who applied but didn't enroll, those who were first-time students, and those that were continuing students. So this was internal data.

Now, we use a system called ArcGIS. There's grants available for discounted rates through the state. I'd recommend you look into that. There's also free platforms like QGIS, but for our purposes, ArcGIS was the best fit. Can anybody see the map? That's now there. Perfect. OK. So within this, you can see, here is OCC and where their campus is at.

And this initial phase I'm going to show, led to the evolving detail that we wanted to see. So when we first did, we wanted to look at where are all applied students who didn't enroll? So we'll see this. And these are in census tracts. So it's kind of spread out. And it's helpful to see it. We see larger ones representing larger populations and communities, but it's still-- it's not getting to the nitty-gritty details, what we looked at. then we're going to say, OK, well, let's look at those who may be enrolled for the first time. Where are they at?

So we had this in. OK. So we see some commonality with some of the similar areas. We see, obviously ones close to the college are pretty popular as well some-- near Tustin and down here in Newport. What about those who enrolled and were continuing? So we have those, and we see some overlay. OK. So we see them overlaid with the gray dots.

And like all great questions we come to resolve, and we look at this, the question is, well, so what? So that led to a further discussion. So before I show you where those are at, that led to a more equity-informed conversation. As Sheri said, she's been fantastic with working with the president's board and those involved. And really, we're saying, well, what are we really trying to get at? And the questions became, where are our potential students at? What's the demographic trends?

So not just what's going on in our school, but what's going on the region. And where there are potential growth of us understanding that. And also what socioeconomic data is involved with that as well. So bringing the map back up. There we go. We get rid of these. We, basically, went through the perspective from a Hispanic serving institution, seeing where communities are there.

So what we're seeing now is a much richer understanding with same academic year of where students are. So these are populations of applied and who did not enrol. Well, from this, it's kind of a harder understanding. But if we group this, we see a better understanding of the concentration of where those students are at. We also want to look at where our students who we're currently serving, are they in alignment with this?

So we looked at enrolled first time. And we see that there is definitely some similar areas as far as where they are-- students are living and coming from who are enrolled for first time and continuing as well. So we see that there clearly are both opportunities, but also known areas that we as Orange Coast College is serving that population.

The question became, well, we know where our students are coming from or potential are coming from, where are the students coming from in the region itself? Or where is this population from in the region itself? So we layer this over, and we see these areas as top areas where in 2021 census information, that our 2021 American Community Survey overlaid with census information. Areas where we find the largest areas of Hispanic serving.

So we can see-- if I get rid of some of the gray, we can see that there are areas that definitely align. And there's also pockets where there's growth where we don't see that. We didn't want to see what's happening in another five years. We want to look at down the line. If you were to look at just information areas you want to serve, what does population look like to change over the next five years?

So we looked at projection data. And we laying over that, and we can see we go to the gray, to the red. So we see a lot of similar layover with the darker red representing areas where there is higher population density within a certain community. And a couple of new spots. So these were some great big picture perspectives.

What we then start to ask ourselves is, how do we then make it to a point where we can then look at areas that are important to us and what we are serving and not serving. So what we looked at is looking at the top five-- let me expand a little bit. Areas where in 2026, we see the Hispanic population is growing at or exists at, and where we don't necessarily have our own enrollments.

You don't see new students coming from a typical year, we don't see students who applied or continuing. So we're looking at, OK, these are areas-- these purple areas are areas that provide a potential need or opportunity within the community. We then also want to see, where are areas that we have outreaches at? So we're seeing also, within these particular census tracts, that the Orange Coast College has a great population of community that continues to grow and the importance of knowing one that areas are continuing to expand in the next five years. So it's important that we continue to work within those communities, and also understand areas that are potentially not as well served or utilized.

In addition, we want to see, OK, there has been-- especially with COVID, a much more understanding of different food deprivation and other areas where there hasn't been as many resources. So when we talk about those areas, there needs to be an understanding of, as we reach out, can there be a better understanding and connection with these communities? And working with them in areas of potential need.

So we want to look at household income rates in which there were those below the living wage and where there was a high populations of those. So we look at that in these areas for 2021 census, and we're finding that the communities that we're serving in these areas that there may be a need to support that.

So there's got to be a consideration as we go into and work with dialogue. Same thing with the income. If we were to project it, we find the next five years, these areas in green are also areas that we need to be considerate of. So we look at where students are at student enroll continuing, we see that there are definitely communities of need and where there may be that service area defined. So if we get rid of some of these to clean up a little bit.

One thing that I think is also important as we talk about working with adult schools is understanding really where your communities are at and where you can work with those. So we looked at, as we mapped out all the adult schools in the area, and we also looked at really where our populations of students, are they near any of these areas that we can potentially work with? Or are there any areas that we could partner with.

Like, we have this-- what we're seeing in the colleges right there. But we also have-- here's one of our partners, Huntington Beach Adult School. This is one of the areas where there is one, the growing area of representation for 2021. Next five years growing area of need, and also partnerships. We want to make sure we continue that partnership with those areas.

So as you start to look and map out just where the students are at, the questions you guys are asking, yourself as well, is in what areas can we potentially grow, and with what partners? We also have high schools. We want to map out to see really where those communities of partners are at. And can we expand in working with those?

So there was a lot of shifting and growing between our ability to understand areas that we're serving and our students are coming from, where there's projected need as it comes to income, and also identifying partners within the region that are part of the adult learners. So there was this ability to understand and going to and saying, if we're going to known that there's a growth in areas of need, is there consideration we need to have for employment alternatives, and snap, and child support.

And really aligning those programs as focus outreach areas of need or identified as opposed to doing-- in the past, you may be working with mass mailers or which can definitely be helpful, but if you know there's a focus area of a census tract or area where there's bigger growth within these, there may be a desire to have a better concentration within that and expanding in that way.

Additionally, it's identifying your partners. How are they doing? Where are they in relation? Are you having that dialogue with adult schools, or your high schools, or other community members, and being able to mark those out. And one, making sure the resources, but two, your students also are aware of what those resources are.

So that was-- again, we did areas where we like we zoomed in with-- this was a particular area where we looked at growth and need an expansion. So allows us to better understand really areas that are focus areas of need and areas of potential growth. So that's really what we worked with OCC under Sheri and then the president's council. And being able to better define what those areas of need are.

And then from there, what we really want to do is look at what were the takeaways and next steps as we look at, here on this visual, as far as OCC and where this area happens to be, we want to make sure as they move forward and having a better understanding of how geospatial data could potentially be utilized, we want to make sure we can talk about focus areas that one have a true understanding for and a need-- one, is there more of a collaboration?

Do we have partners in the area, or can we work with partners that may be very well connected with the community and maybe our best ends within that? And then of course, supporting the equity lens. We want to make sure we're going from their need and their perspective. So I think one of the big things is understanding what representation do we have in the communities? If we don't, what are better ways to understand those opportunities?

So that's really where the awareness of the underserved populations was defined, and really, us using the geospatial information to better identify areas that we can expand into.

Stephanie Feger: I think a second take away here is really tailoring our programs to meet underserved populations, but also looking at it through-- as Sheri said, that different lens. And so I just want to put it out for the group to get your thoughts, maybe, if you could enter something in the chat. Do you use these kind of tools-- and one of the ways that we are thinking about using this is expanding the number of locations where classes are offered.

And what would you think would be the benefits of using this type of tool to really help identify those locations? What kind of priorities would you set? So why don't you give that some thought and you can enter some comments in the chat? Are you using geospatial tools, and what do you think having this location information can do in terms of identifying potential sites?

C.J. BISHOP: You're going to unmute too. Feel free to have a dialog as well if anybody wants to chime in either--

[interposing voices]

--using it. Or what you'd like to see in using it. There's a question. Are there individuals that are currently using any type of geospatial information out there? Or looking to use. I mentioned ArcGIS, I mentioned QGIS as potential options. There's also other ones out there. So I'm not sure if anybody's using any particular geospatial information. I may wish to have the gain.

Stephanie Feger: Anybody want to break the ice? Jump into the conversation here. I think it looks like folks are multitasking.

C.J. BISHOP: Yeah.

Stephanie Feger: OK. So feel free, if you have some thoughts about that, just to enter to the chat. We'd like to have a little bit more of a dialogue. But what we're looking at is, how can we-- one of the objectives that we've said to address some of the gaps is to expand the number of locations where classes are offered. So let's see. We have a question here. Could you show the GGAE site area again? OK. So Kathleen, did you want to look at-- OK. Great. Yeah. C.J. I'll turn it over to you.

C.J. BISHOP: Yeah. If you want me to select any characteristics about the area, feel free to chime in.

Audience: No. I just didn't see it when you did the map the first time of the adult schools. I was trying to find them and I couldn't find them.

C.J. BISHOP: Oh. Got you. Got you. Yeah. So we look at some of the adult schools in Orange County and we expand out some of the ones in the region. We are consortium partners with a couple. We worked very closely with Huntington Beach Adult School who has a couple locations. We also work with the Organization on Garden Grove as well.

And actually, if I-- we did this one example. But as we kind of move forward, and if we're interested, there's also new resources and tools, especially, through ArcGIS in which there is a social equity analysis. And what they've done is, you can look at a couple different characteristics. Say, there's a characteristic such as meeting basic high school education.

And also you find within the community, there's a need for child care. What they've done is developed hotspots of areas where those are cross-examined and where there's a highest need. And then there's an opportunity to look at what is the area that is closest to them. So there may be some areas where say, it's a local church or local community center or the case may be.

So it looks to areas of how can you best expand your outreach to what the community needed. So that's really the next step as far as we look forward. But I'd also recommend, if you start exploring, one is getting a feel of the area, but secondly, it's getting a better understanding of these questions you can layer over top one another and determine the best way to maybe do outreach. I see we've got a couple of questions coming in.

So yeah. This is adult Ed only with this site. Show the Garden Grove. If you look in-- oops. My mouse is not working. In Garden Grove. We got GGUSD Education Center, Santa Ana's got one, Huntington Beach. Improve access to underserved populations. Awesome. Thank you.

Kristen, where is the list? Yeah. You can actually for these. I'm not sure if the question's a list. You can actually look at, within a tool, and here's how these things are mapped out. I use what's called raster data. So that's, basically, you get characteristics of certain-- you have a map location and you can put in different characteristics.

So for instance, if we looked at a listing of populations for top 5 Hispanic not represented, if we bring this up, you can even export in certain lists, identify certain census tracts and different populations that exist. So it can get pretty detailed. So we want to keep it high-level, but you can definitely get into details of exporting certain lists to better understand it.

And you can do some analysis outside of it. Was I subject matter expert on this? No. I was not. So luckily, one of the things I do recommend, I was working with colleges is, one of the benefits of why we recommend ArcGIS despite different community colleges and eligible partners getting discount is they do a phenomenal job recording and provide different training sessions. They also have a pretty robust online community, and they suction out different-- everything from YouTube videos to-- I mean, I heard a podcast.

And they also do a lot of online content. So it allows you to explore it. And there is a way to ease yourself into it. So this is fairly user friendly. I've since picked up other meeting certificates in it to better understand it. But the reality is, if you want to get into this, having certain people that are data advocates or who are very familiar with it is the best people to talk out to, because they are going to best know how to get that information.

And mapping it out, again, it's pretty-- there's some really good content, especially, through ArcGIS that allows you to go step by step process to better understand that.

Stephanie Feger: And I also shared in the chat, C.J, some of the links to the Living Atlas and the policy maps that Esri has produced. So they are available and readily available. And you can-- essentially, can't do all the analysis that C.J. did right here because you'd obviously need to bring in your own data.

But it's probably working with somebody in institutional research that can kind of get a leg up on this a little bit or even just looking at those Living Atlas maps and being able to see some of the issues that we've talked about here that are in your community. And you can actually drill down to your own location.

So there are a lot of free resources that you can get a start with. And then just to comment on what Lorenzio was saying, you know, I think it's exciting to use this tool in a lot of different ways. Because one of the things that was happening was during the pandemic where the president's cabinet was meeting and C.J. and I were over in the district office and they were on campus. And we just were like flies on the wall listening to the conversation.

But it was so dynamic and exciting to hear the conversation, because people can situate themselves in a map. It's different than just looking at data, which is important and necessary and informative. But it gives a whole other kind of context to it. I don't know, Sheri, did you want to say anything about that in terms of how it's been used on the campus?

Sheri Sterner: Sure. Yeah. Definitely. One thing I will mention before I talk on that is that C.J. showed the views on the map where we specifically looked at our Hispanic and Latinx population at the college and in the community. And so I failed to mention earlier, maybe in specificity, that we are a federally designated Hispanic serving institution.

It is now our majority student population. And it is our fastest growing population. So that is one reason why, in our first round of analysis as we looked at the data, we focused on that population. So I wanted to clarify that if some of you were wondering why did they focus there? And again, it was based on a multitude of factors at the institution.

Does not mean we're not looking at the other populations or other racial ethnic populations, but that's why we looked at that as one of our first primary views. But now to Stephanie's question is, I think the really exciting thing about this tool is it's a dynamic tool that you can use to engage your executive teams or decision making teams on campus.

As Stephanie mentioned, we had Stephanie and C.J. come to a-- I think we did a small half day session on looking at how we're meeting the community. And as C.J. was going through some of the preliminary views that we had developed, our president's cabinet was able to ask questions. And say, well, what about this? And then C.J. was able to say, well, we've prepared that and click, click, click. Here you go. And then they're like, zoom in on that.

Why do we know? We took away some questions and we said, we'll come back and refine these views. Other times, the pre-planning that we had done with C.J, Stephanie, and myself really helped guide that. And so it really allows you to have an intentional focus on your conversation. But then it also allows those participating, that ability to have their questions answered dynamically. And to just see that right there.

And it really focused us on the issue at hand and stopped us from going down some rabbit holes that conversations normally go. And so it really does-- I think, if you remember, we wanted to have our direct and intentional focus at looking at this data. And I think this tool really allowed us to do that. And it also really engaged and empowered our leaders who were looking at this data to look at the information, engage directly with that information than other outside information or influences that come in those conversations.

So where we came up with out of this conversation after we explored our data with the tool, our president's cabinet came up with really that we needed to retool our enrollment planning and outreach efforts. We really saw that we needed to strengthen our equity and inclusion lens as we looked at the needs of our community, even with regards to outreach. We talked about needing to have more focus and targeted marketing materials.

Really looking at certain populations in our enrollment management. Are we meeting those population needs? Are we not? Back to Stephanie's conversation about, are there different programs that we need to engage and meet our community needs? We also developed, out of this, both short term goals and long term goals.

I think a lot of times, at least at my institution, we want to create these robust long term goals where we are going to solve every problem. But we realize that with this tool, you have to really go in with setting some short term goals and saying, we're going to start here. And it was very purposeful between C.J, Stephanie, and myself that we said, we're going to go into this meeting, and we're going to avoid what we call analysis paralysis.

Because as folks look at any data or particularly a tool that can do so much, you really have to give them-- and what's nice within the tool is, if you do that pre-planning, you have a beginning and end to the data so they can explore to a certain point. But they can't go too far, again, if you don't prep it to far to get people down what we like to call here those rabbit holes.

And so we said, OK, we're going to develop some short term goals, we know what we can do as a first step, and then we can dig into the data more or as our short term goal moves forward, expand on that. But we also did provide the opportunity to do some longer term goals. So it was nice to have that blend, and I will say, each area in our college represented by the president's cabinet was able to make those goals to really immediate-- and that's what we wanted.

We wanted to have an immediate impact with this data and put it into action. And this data allowed us to do both. Short term and then to look more strategically in terms of supporting our college goals and values. So I think it was a very inclusive and intentional use of the data and the tool that we had, which I think, was very successful. Because sometimes, if any of you have been in those types of meetings, and I'm sure you have, you start here and you end up here.

So we were very much. And again, really making them feel part of the decision making rather than with some of the flat or just standard data we have. It's just like here it is. Here, they could explore. And so I think that is an absolute benefit of the tool. And it really highlighted those areas that we need to study more and serve better in our community.

C.J. BISHOP: One thing I'd like to add too is, so being on like the data nerd practitioner side of it, so there are things like, you may have some questions about community characteristics. And you're like, well, I want this, but it seems like it's only available through like a census or American Community Survey or some other source, so I got to pull that, I may need to get a TIGER file, do all this other stuff, which, depending on how detailed you may want to do that, however, with the ArcGIS, there's an ability to layer on certain characteristics.

So you can-- it's already built in. You can select say, income level or houses with disability based on specific disability or there's the state works with Lightcast, formerly Emsi. And they have different projection data based on jobs and those kind of things. Those are built in. So what you can do-- again, they've got some pretty good big picture topics that you can layer your information and then use those based on if a certain community region or maybe just your students to better understand, hey, if we were to look at this big picture community level, what does that look like?

So if you are working with your data stewards or whoever you're looking at, there are things that are built in that. Tell them to not be scared, it's already built in. So you're more than welcome to get a heads up and a leg up on that process because of those resources already in there. So that's one of the things. I think, the biggest thing is getting yourself acquainted with the data you want, the questions you want to answer. But there's a lot of available resources already there within the ArcGIS solution.

Stephanie Feger: And one thing that I would add here too is, we've also had some really great success in reaching out to faculty who are in geography departments, or even if you don't have a big GIS program, generally people who are in the geography departments are going to be knowledgeable about these tools. So they can be a great resource. Other great resources are public health faculty. We're really looking at expanding work around community health worker and using these tools for that particular program.

And there's a lot of interest and enthusiasm. And I think it really builds this cross-pollination across departments. And looking at this data in different ways. So don't be afraid to reach out to your colleagues and faculty that are out there.

C.J. BISHOP: Good point.

Stephanie Feger: OK. So I think we're getting to the end. Do we have any more slides, C.J?

C.J. BISHOP: Just if you guys want to contact us, you're more than welcome to.

Stephanie Feger: OK. Great. Great. Yeah. Feel free to drop us an email. We're glad to follow up with you. Thanks for joining us for the session today. Let's see. We're going to have an evaluation link there. So please give us some feedback, and thank you, everybody. Have a great rest of the conference.

C.J. BISHOP: And thank you for your time.

Sheri Sterner: Yeah. Thank you, guys. Have a great day. There will be a link posted in the chat for the session in addition to the overall session, evaluation link. And thank you everyone for joining us today. First day of CAEP Summit 2022. Have a great day.