Knowing Your Data is COOL

Click on the link http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/29/spellings for a piece in "Inside Higher Ed" on Margaret Spellings's complaints regarding information on higher education, and how her own department already answers the "lack" she decries.

For me it illustrates a number of things: how cries for assessment indicators are often made by people who've never looked for the plentiful data available; how useful is the ENORMOUS amount of higher ed data collected and publicly reported by the U.S. Department of Education; and how all of us probably have data in our own back pockets (or on our Web sites) that could improve our practice...and our minds. --Lynda Milne