Higher Education and the Perfect Data Storm

Some quotes:

In education, data always arrives too late, like Inspector Clouseau, blundering into a scene, oblivious to what’s really going on or who the villain is.  The kind of information data yields is retrospective, not predictive.  Correlation, as we know, is not causation.  To this, I would add mathematization is not explanation. I just learned “mathematization” is among the “bottom 20% of lookups” in the online Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary; what exactly does this tell me?

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Even analyzed data is haunted by forging, fudging, trimming, and cooking, along with confirmation bias and egocentric thinking.

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I am going to make a radical suggestion about data and higher education:  colleges and universities will be better served if they avoid kneeling at the altar of data and instead fill key positions with people driven by intuition, experience, values, conviction, and principle.  A good place to start would be looking for leadership guided by a transcendent educational narrative.

An article at the Register yesterday ranked buzzwords’ credibility from -1.0 (not at all credible) to +1.0 (credible). “Data-driven” was rated -0.76.