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Black data: higher education, datafication, and the Black student body

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Abstract

The fullness of Black students’ experiences in college has yet to be archived. The same can be said of Black people broadly, whose existence has long been reduced by and to what is observable, by systems of power and those at the helm. This is perhaps due to the structural and structural limitations of data collection efforts, or not of interest to decision-makers. Or perhaps, this is a symbol of the impossibility of capturing Black life beyond the physical. Regardless, Black life on college campuses across the globe is systematically reduced to standard institutional measures. This reduction is facilitated by the ongoing datafication of student success—the ways that students’ success has been made metric and the ways student success as a socio-political phenomenon has been increasingly governed by data-related practices and discourses. As a result, Black students’ material and data realities are (re)constructed, especially through student success data practices.

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Notes

  1. Technés race of racism refers to the practices that animate and enact race and racism, building from the conceptualization of race as a social technology and racism as a societal technique. Beth Coleman advanced the concept of race as technology. Rather than the contemporary digital invocations, technology from its etymological origin means the study of technique. Coleman invokes this meaning to talk about race as technology, which she positions as “a disruptive technology that changes the terms of engagement with an all-too-familiar system of representation and power” (Coleman, 2009, p. 178).

  2. The New Jim Code consists of the ways new, often digital, technologies reflect and reproduce existing ideologies under the guise of neutrality, objectivity, and societal advancement.

  3. Institutional Research is the common nomenclature for offices at US colleges and universities that are hubs for the collection, governance, and dissemination of institutional data.

  4. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), with wild acclaim and rapid adoption, made an inextricable connection between data and educational practices.

  5. Taylor (2022) offered the term student success enterprise to describe the emergence and implications of student success as a social enterprise, shaped by exogenous economic and political priorities.

  6. Introduced by US Congress in 2007 and adopted as a part of the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, PBIs are institutions that enroll 40% or more Black students and who do not already hold HBCU and HSI designations.

  7. Cosey’s (2023) critique of power within Hollywood, used Black racial excess to describe the undesirable and abject elements of Blackness, precluded from Black representations and storytelling.

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  1. Indiana University, W. W. Wright Education Building, 201 N. Rose Ave., Bloomington, IN, 47405-1006, USA

    Leonard Taylor Jr

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Taylor, L. Black data: higher education, datafication, and the Black student body. High Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01141-6

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