Understanding what is going on in the sector and getting a quick read on the latest data and how your institution stacks up has been a perpetual pain in Australian HE.
Which is why it is worth checking out the free data visualisation and comparison tool developed by Benjie-Etta Norman and the team at CoreBridge, which enables users to look at performance of the whole sector and individual institutions across a whole range of metrics – including student demand, enrolments, job growth, completion rates for low-SES students, just to name a few.
There are obvious limitations – the lag in provision of public data to feed the tool, the limitations of machine-generated interpretations etc – but this is clearly a labour of love for the team. While building a reputation as supreme data crunchers has undoubted branding benefits for the firm, it is hard to see how they would be anything like the investment of hours in developing this labyrinthine resource.
The ability to look at latest stats at a glance for each institution is incredibly useful – and a companion data dive providing stats for UK universities has now also been launched.
The data is all open sourced, with more than 23 million rows in the Australian version alone – but by scraping it into one location and adding an overlay of interpretation the tool is likely to be bookmarked by many people invested in the future of HE.
It is easy to see how this could become a valuable international comparison tool providing insights beyond rankings over time – with the potential to retool the system and repackage comparative data for prospective students in a timely, attractive way that could usurp some existing ranking systems down the track.