Using Data to Advance Equity in Colleges and Universities: A Critical Study of Practitioners’ Recounted Experiences in Predominantly White Contexts

Context: The national completion and accountability agendas for higher education have intersected in complex ways with our current moments of racial reckoning and pushback, lending renewed urgency to data-informed equity work in colleges and universities. Although the purposeful communication of data is widely understood to be a pivotal tool in equity efforts, data alone cannot improve policy and practice. The advancement of equity in higher education hinges on social processes that take institutional actors from disaggregated data to sense-making to action, and yet the research on these phenomena is still emerging. Faculty and administrators’ direct experiences with data-informed equity work can tell us a great deal about how policy and practice come together, informed by institutional and individual social contexts. Purpose: Focused on understanding practitioners’ recounted experiences, this study helps to address the need for more research on how the intricacies of data-informed equity work unfold on the ground. Consistent with recent calls for further research, we apply critical social theory and critical-race lenses to understand how participants experience social processes surrounding data in the context of institutional equity efforts. Research Design: We conducted 29 semistructured interviews with 14 faculty members and 15 mid- to senior-level administrators working at five institutions that had been recognized for data-informed equity and student success efforts. Analyses entailed iterative rounds of coding, pragmatic horizon analyses, and collaborative peer debriefing. We paid particular attention throughout to cultivate researcher reflexivity and to understand the ways in which our positionalities and experiences played a role in the research. Drawing on critical qualitative research methodology, we applied frameworks (critical race theory and theory of communicative action) that center intersectionality and theorize about how systems of oppression implicitly structure our everyday lives in unacknowledged ways. Conclusions: Applying critical qualitative methods and critical-race lenses in our analyses, we examined how systems of power and oppression worked in predominantly White contexts to shape: (1) the conditions of action, (2) the subjectivity and positionality of actors, and (3) microprocesses practitioners encountered in their efforts to advance equity through the use of data. Participants recounted processes that ran into several types of complications and obstacles, including inequitable dynamics, attitudes and beliefs that normalize inequities, and work structures that point participants and collaborators toward technorational solutions. The complexities participants engaged—and those they elided—illustrated critical-race concepts in multiple ways. Findings and implications underscore the need to center institutional responsibility for equity explicitly and address the complexities of systemic racism embedded in our social and operational structures.