Data Strategist (Equity Initiative)

About City Colleges of Chicago

City Colleges of Chicago (CCC), the largest community college system in Illinois, is made up of seven colleges and five satellite sites, providing more than 70,000 students each year with access to quality, affordable education. “Championing Equity” is a five-year plan to build the infrastructure and momentum to ultimately close equity gaps within CCC. The project’s objectives and activities provide for developing the systems, strategies, and tools needed to achieve unprecedented and equitable student outcomes. Its major activities include creating new dashboards to better define, monitor, and assess equity data across the district; building a cross-college cohort of continuous improvement experts, or “Equity Champions;” and enacting strategies to achieve equity through an innovative microgrant program to help generate solutions.

Position Description

Reporting to the Associate Vice Chancellor of Decision Support and working in close collaboration with the Associate Vice Chancellor of Racial Equity, the Data Strategist (Equity Initiative) builds district capacity for rapidly harnessing and monitoring data for new insights on challenges and promising practices that advance equity goals. The position provides equity-focused data analysis, monitoring metrics from various data sources, developing and facilitating the tracking of leading performance indicators, and supporting district and colleges in the strategic use of data to advance CCC’s goals of dismantling structural racism and eliminating educational inequities at CCC.

Responsibilities

Provide data and analytic support

• Conduct strategic data analysis
• Identify insights and implications from institutional data and make strategic recommendations to executive and senior staff at both the college and district-level, with a particular focus on inequities within colleges and across the district
• Develop, in collaboration with stakeholders across the district, data displays, such as an Equity Dashboard, that clearly communicate complex analyses to multiple audiences, including executive and senior staff

Facilitate the development and use of metrics to support equity initiatives

• Work in partnership with the Associate Vice Chancellor of Racial Equity and college leaders to identify leading indicators
• Measure progress of goals set in City Colleges’ 2021-2025 Equity Plans
• Use operational data in real-time to develop and execute action plans focused on improving institutional practices, policies, procedures, and equitable student success

Work cross-functionally across the organization

• Maintain cross-functional visibility across all departments to help push equity-focused initiatives forward and surface critical issues
• Provide ongoing oversight and support to management and decision-making to ensure that measures are being used to effectively manage operations and effect institutional change

Develop and refine institutional data capacity through data use:

• Support development of district/college-wide data collection, analysis, and dissemination of policies and practices
• Train researchers and staff to make meaningful data connections, with a particular focus on connecting data to institutional equity goals

Develop and refine institutional data and equity capacity through knowledge sharing:

• Facilitate regular reviews with district/college team
• Synthesize and share key insights across projects
• Develop, maintain, and train teams on infrastructure (such as SharePoint) to support knowledge management

Develop and refine institutional data capacity through capacity building:

• Help staff use data in real-time, lead data capacity building trainings on data literacy and using data to surface and overcome institutional inequities
• Support the development of tools, templates, and reports that address the needs of building data and equity capacity across CCC
• Provide support to the implementation, maintenance, and adoption of CCC business intelligence tools

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree from an accredited college or university in a quantitative discipline such as statistics, business, mathematics, economics, public policy, or a related field of study
• Three years of relevant experience in research or data analysis, with demonstrated experience in quantitative and qualitative research methods and statistics
• Experience using data to identify and address issues related to equity in the field of higher education
• High level of proficiency in the use of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook)
• Moderate to high level of proficiency with SQL programming or data querying
• Experience with Power BI, Tableau, or other data visualization tools
• Experience with statistical analysis software (e.g., SAS, R, STATA)
• Experience in quantitative statistical analysis highly desirable.
• Experience using SQL Server
• Excellent project planning and management skills
• Strong communication skills
• Ability to work within a culturally diverse environment
• Ability to cultivate and maintain strategic partnerships with key stakeholders