A University Took an Uncommonly Close Look at Its Student-Conduct Data. Here’s What It Found.

When colleges try to understand their students, they resort to a common tool: the survey.

And surveys are fine, says Dayna Weintraub, director of student-affairs research and assessment at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. But she also recognizes their drawbacks: poor response rates, underrepresentation of particular demographic groups, and, in certain instances, answers that lack needed candor.

And so, to assess and change student conduct in a more effective way, Weintraub and her colleagues have tried a new approach: find existing, direct, and detailed data on how Rutgers students conduct themselves, and combine them.

Leading the effort was Kevin Pitt, director of student conduct at the New Jersey university. Working alongside Weintraub, he and his team analyzed, with granular specificity, the behavior patterns of students in a variety of contexts: consuming excessive alcohol or drugs, in questionable sexual situations, and others. Pitt and his team examined student-level trends within those areas, combining a variety of previously siloed databases to sketch a more-informative picture of student life at Rutgers.

“People don’t realize how much data we have right at our fingertips,” Weintraub said. “Kevin and his team really rose to that occasion, thinking through what data do we have that exists to tell us about who our students are.”

For instance, to study behavior patterns tied to alcohol abuse on the campus, Pitt and his colleagues first obtained a log of students who had been transported to the hospital because of excessive alcohol use. The team joined that information with student demographic characteristics, like race, major, or grade-point average. That merging of data sets resulted in a number of surprising findings, including:

• Business majors represented nearly 25 percent of all alcohol transports in the fall of 2016, despite constituting less than 12 percent of the student body.
• Football games with narrow final scores correlated with fewer alcohol transports, as compared with a greater number of transports on nights with more-lopsided results.
• Men and women used alcohol transports at similar rates.

Armed with that information, Pitt and Weintraub changed the process by which the Rutgers leadership was made aware of conduct violations. Most student-conduct operations rely on the annual compilation and reporting of statistics required by the Clery Act to understand student behavior patterns. That approach, though, is often too little, too late. And it limits, Pitt said, the options that are available to administrators to manage dangerous behaviors among students.

Instead, Pitt and his team provide a report of misconduct violations on a biweekly basis. Included in the report are counts of various categories of student misconduct for those two weeks, as well as year-to-date counts. There are also comparisons between misconduct counts for the current academic year relative to the previous one.

Kerri Willson, Rutgers’s director of off-campus living and community partnerships, said the focus on data has been illuminating, and it has helped her craft policies and programs for students.

For example, Willson’s department started pop-up assistance hubs in on-campus living areas on Halloween, to hand out food and water to the night’s party-goers. The efforts were intended to counteract the effects of heavy drinking on dehydrated students with empty stomachs. The program was a success, and similar plans are in the works for this year’s Halloween festivities.

The analysis of Pitt and his team, Willson said, “helped inform our programming model, and to make sure that we are having an impact, we want our students to make good, educated decisions. However we can creatively help them to do that, while also being supported by data — that’s helpful.”

In the future, Willson, Pitt, and Weintraub said, they are plotting new ways to approach and study student conduct. They want to understand how weather patterns might correlate with rates of misconduct, for example. And Willson would like to survey students this coming Halloween when they interact with her department’s assistance hubs, to better understand their health and wellness in the moment.

Dan Bauman is a reporter who investigates and writes about all things data in higher education. Tweet him at @danbauman77 or email him at dan.bauman@chronicle.com.