Student data key to campus planning

PLAN AHEAD: Russell Carey, executive vice president for planning and policy at Brown University, says that involving students in the planning process is part of the school’s culture. Student data was critical to a planned engineering-school expansion. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
PLAN AHEAD: Russell Carey, executive vice president for planning and policy at Brown University, says that involving students in the planning process is part of the school’s culture. Student data was critical to a planned engineering-school expansion. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Brown University’s decision to expand its School of Engineering within its College Hill campus was driven in part by analysis of an extensive collection of data involving faculty, staff and students, including an elaborate map that tracked regular travel patterns in order to best determine the location of new buildings.
“I think it’s part of our culture,” said Russell Carey, executive vice president for planning and policy, of involving students in the university’s strategic-planning process. “In the campus planning process, we gather a tremendous amount of information from students, faculty and staff, and how they work together, make use of curriculum, and [what they] would like to see improved in the physical campus.”
Brown isn’t the only local college to utilize such measures in strategic planning, though its use and analysis of such data regarding its engineering school appears more extensive than other local schools.
Sasaki Associates, the Watertown, Mass.-based planning and design firm that produced a MyCampus survey that Brown used in its analysis, said the mapping process is a relatively new incorporation that they have not used elsewhere in Rhode Island. The survey collected responses on preferred spaces and how and with whom they collaborate in research, teaching and service.
“We started doing [the survey] because we were finding the need to have an inclusive planning process. You can have forums and meetings, but you only get feedback from those who are willing to speak up,” said Tyler Patrick, a partner at the firm. “We thought this is a way we can do more of a visual survey.”
Patrick said the benefit is that the survey gives a “real physicality to the information you’re looking at.”
Sasaki Associates has used the My-Campus survey at about 30 campuses in the last two to three years.
“Brown was the first [campus] where we were able to do it in an html version used on an iPad. We’ve been constantly tweeking and modifying it,” Patrick said. “I still think we’re pretty much leading this area.”
Brown’s engineering school was founded in 2010 and expanding it had been one focal point of a universitywide strategic plan that kicked into high gear after new university President Christina Paxson came onboard in mid-2012. Carey served as co-chair of Brown’s Committee on Reimagining the Brown Campus and Community, which determined the engineering school needs 100,000 square feet of additional space to help increase graduate-student enrollment by 50 percent, add 15 faculty members, establish a center for entrepreneurship and renovate classroom and laboratory space.
Data collected in the survey, Carey said, was extremely critical in establishing that those improvements – already backed by $44 million in gifts that will help launch a $160 million capital campaign – would happen on College Hill.
More than 2,500 students, faculty and staff completed the MyCampus survey. A detailed analysis of undergraduate course enrollments was used to evaluate how those students move between academic units.
What all the data found is that engineering students take too many classes in other disciplines, and vice versa, for it to make sense for undergraduate students to trek back and forth between the College Hill campus and a Knowledge District building throughout the academic day. Brown’s potential expansion into the Knowledge District, beyond the Warren Alpert Medical School already there, is closely watched by city officials and others who would like to see the university play an even greater role in spurring economic development in the area.
“This [expansion location] was a very, very big issue here at Brown,” said Lawrence Larson, dean of the school of engineering. “They did this just amazing, data-driven analysis of how students move throughout the day and used this to make some pretty powerful recommendations.
Rhode Island College in 2009 put out an open request to faculty, staff and students, for comments and suggestions of any nature in developing its Vision 2015 plan that was approved in August 2012.
The University of Rhode Island recently completed its new Hillside Hall residence, which has 429 new beds, living and learning communities, and environmental improvements, as well as classrooms.
Robert Weygand, vice president for administration and finance, said URI sought the input of what he called the building’s “primary customers or users” in determining the facility’s makeup and focus. “That was a huge success. We’ve done that with [buildings] such as dining halls. They all fall into place very nicely when you have input for purpose,” he said. “We have a wide variety of different capital-improvement projects throughout campus that we feel … requires the involvement, opinions and input from students, faculty and staff.”
Weygand also pointed to the scheduled groundbreaking of a new chemistry building in June. The building will cost between $65 million and $70 million and Weygand said planning relied heavily upon faculty, researchers and graduate students.
Steve Maurano, assistant vice president for public affairs, community and government relations at Providence College, said that the redesign of the school’s signature core curriculum Western-civilization component, part of a five-year strategic plan approved in fall 2011, was a direct result of input from faculty and students on how they wanted to see that material delivered.
Maurano also said that now that the new core curriculum is ending its first year in practice, the college will be looking for a lot of feedback from students and faculty on how it has worked and what changes may need to be addressed going forward.
“You always get more agreement and buy-in from people when you involve them in the planning process,” he said.
He added that an academic institution operates differently this way in strategic planning than a large corporation. It is not, he said, an environment where decisions are made only at the top and then orders are followed through the chains.
At Brown, the school of engineering certainly won’t be the last project in which student data is collected and considered in strategic decision-making.
Carey said that throughout the year Brown engages student, faculty and staff feedback in a variety of formats, from focus groups to internal surveys and data gathering.
“A lot of what we’ve learned this year has been about what we think will work best academically and programmatically,” Carey said. “I think that in the last decade around our plan for academic enrichment a lot of attention has been paid to measurement, assessment and evaluating.” •

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