By George Lorenzo – Published on July 12, 2023
Why It Matters
The findings of a Rutgers University Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) research project on how two- and four-year colleges and universities employ labor market information (LMI) data offers important insights for higher education institutions that have adopted or are considering to adopt LMI data collection and analysis services.
Abstract
We reviewed two recently published EERC-authored publications on LMI adoption and implementation and interviewed two of the project’s researchers to get a broad perspective about how labor market data can be used for achieving a wide range of higher education goals.
Learn More
This three-year Lumina-funded project that began in 2020 has yielded a significant amount of helpful information for colleges and universities to get a keen understanding about LMI. Here we address an issue brief and report titled Emerging Insights Into the Use of Labor Market Information in Postsecondary Education. Another report, not covered here that was published at press time, is titled How Colleges and Universities are Using Labor Market Information: A National Snapshot.
The Emerging Insights findings were based on a study of the literature and 10 case studies focused on LMI practices, five from two-year institutions and five from four-year institutions, plus interviews with 50 varied representative LMI professionals at the 10 institutions.
Shifting Landscape
EERC Director Michelle Van Noy explained how the LMI landscape has shifted in the past decade to include a continuously growing and wider swath of information on jobs and hiring trends generated by both governmental and private-sector data collection and analysis providers. The emergence of large-scale, real-time jobs data has changed how higher education looks at such trends – “that’s what motivated our research,” she said.
In addition to for-profit companies such as Lightcast, CHMURA, LinkedIn, and many others, “there’s been a lot of investment from the federal government and states to bring together data systems to allow for the examination of employment outcomes,” Van Noy added. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau; numerous additional labor market databases from the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration; and newly advanced Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems have all significantly boosted the amount of LMI data available today.
Usage Details
How is postsecondary education using all this data? As noted in the EERC Emerging Insights findings, “institutions may use LMI to improve the quality of their programs and align them more closely with employer needs and students’ education and employment goals.” That overall goal includes a variety of ways for institutions to apply LMI, including:
- Program review, development, and improvement – LMI is used to support, reject, improve, expand, or sunset programs as well as to justify costs and funding for new faculty and supplies.
- Academic and strategic planning – LMI is used to inform such planning as well as a method to help prepare students for the workforce, enhance post-graduation life, and address local community workforce and economic development.
- Recruitment and enrollment management – LMI is used to attract student enrollees by being transparent about relevant skills students acquire within a wide variety of career paths.
- Relationship building with external partners – LMI is shared with employers, community partners, and state and system offices to identify opportunities for partnerships and serve community needs.
- Advising – LMI is used to assist students with connecting career interests to jobs and developing transferable skills. It was also noted that higher education advisors face a lack of professional development opportunities.
All of these LMI application trends come with their own sets of issues and challenges, and distinctions arise between institutions concerning how and why application trends are treated and controlled by academic leaders, administrators, and faculty. “There is a difference in attitudes around LMI, depending on if you’re at a two-year versus a four-year institution,” as well as whether or not a college has a liberal arts focus, Van Noy said.
It was noted in the Emerging Insights report that “several four-year institutions with schools of arts and sciences explained the added challenge of misleading narratives about the career value of liberal arts contributing to enrollment concerns.”
In relation to funding mechanisms for LMI adoption, two-year institutions were required to follow mandates created by federal and state policies, “often resulting in more formalized LMI processes than at four- year institutions. . . In addition, two-year institutions used LMI to develop academic and strategic plans and tended to focus more on workforce development, though both two- and four-year institutions aimed to use LMI to help students achieve their future educational and career goals.”
Infrastructure
Uses of LMI services via for profit vendor paid-licensing arrangements are a relatively nascent development in higher education, said EERC Researcher Victoria Coty, adding that, in the area of student advising purposes, for instance, “some institutions don’t have the infrastructure to support licenses for everyone who works in advising to have access to those data.” Additionally, the overall utilization of LMI has not been institutionalized at most college and universities.
Infrastructure building at any level always has cost and funding implications. Many institutions “don’t really have the funding,” Van Noy noted. For example, “if you think about employer engagement [listed under the aforesaid relationship building with external partners category], it falls under the basket of things colleges ought to be doing but don’t have the funding.”
Skepticism
Healthy skeptical concerns were also expressed across the LMI adoption landscape. Sometimes there are discrepancies related to the data provided by LMI services when compared to what faculty and staff hear from local employers, especially at two-year institutions with close ties to workforce development in their communities, Coty said. Or, reflections of the landscape that reveal contrasts in county, state, and local comparisons of LMI might generate contrary points of view among academic leaders and the administrators running the LMI data.
Another source of skepticism might concern broader roles of LMI as they relate “to the liberal arts being threatened by too much influence on preparing for jobs and employer influence,” Van Noy said. “At the same time four-year institutions are recognizing ways they can help people prepare for careers and how these data can help.”
Overall Intentions
The issue brief and report reveal examples of how educators are actively using data. “They are intended to spark and share ideas,” Van Noy said. The overall purpose of the LMI research project was “to share some of the lessons we saw in our case study schools with others around the country, and our hope was to pick a good variety of schools that help to represent the range of how these data are being used.”
Also see Workforce Monitor’s labor market information category.