Repairing the Foundation: Data Hygiene Playbook for Higher Ed

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Higher ed data hygiene is easy to put off, because a hairline crack in a foundation wall never looks urgent. But the crack is never the real problem. What moved underneath it is. Your student data works the same way — the dashboard still loads, the numbers still appear, and nothing tells you something below has already shifted.

This SIG Connect session makes the case for student data cleanup as the work that protects the most money for the least new spending. It walks through three cracks that turn up in SIS environments again and again: the student who exists twice and gets reported as unenrolled, the batch rule that silently moves a cohort from full-time to half-time, and the platform purchase that migrates both problems into an expensive new system.

Then it gets to the repair. Not an 18-month task force — a clean room. Pick one population and one set of fields, document what’s wrong before fixing anything, and repair inside that boundary. Standardize first, deduplicate second, purge third. Add governance (a named owner, one written definition of “enrolled,” a scheduled inspection) so the same work doesn’t come back around in five years.

The session closes with three questions any institution can answer in an afternoon, with no software, no consultant, and no line item:

• Which reports do we quietly not trust?
• Where do two records describe one student?
• What are we still keeping that nothing consumes?