You've probably sat through some version of this meeting. The board dashboard comes up, the graduation rate hasn't moved, and somebody asks why. The room goes quiet for a second, and then the guesses start. Was it the advising redesign? Did that ever launch? Who's running it now?
Most of the universities I talk with aren't short on metrics. They have an institutional research office that's good at what it does and a dashboard somebody worked hard to build. What they're usually missing is the connection between the number on the dashboard and the work that's supposed to change it, and that's what this post is about.
If you want the short version, here it is. Pick a few metrics for each goal, add a couple of early signs that tell you during the year whether you're on track, give every initiative behind them a named owner, and look at all of it together on a schedule everybody knows.
What your accreditor is asking for
A lot of KPI work starts because an accreditation visit is on the calendar, so it's worth knowing what they're looking for. None of the big regional accreditors hand you a list of metrics or a review schedule. What they want to see is that you have a plan, that you're tracking progress against it with real data, and that the data is shaping decisions.
Higher Learning Commission (HLC), effective September 2025. Look at Criterion 4, Core Components 4.A and 4.C. They ask for systematic strategic planning that relies on data, and data-informed decision making.
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), 2024 Principles. Look at Principles 7.1 and 7.3. They ask for ongoing planning and evaluation, a regular review of goals and outcomes, and outcomes for administrative support units too.
Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), effective July 1, 2026. Look at Standard 5, criterion 5.5. It asks for planning, budgeting and improvement that line up with each other, plus regular reporting against goals using KPIs.
Middle States gets the closest to naming a dashboard. Its new standards ask for "regular reporting on institutional performance in meeting established goals using data indicators or key performance indicators (KPIs)." And if you're accredited by HLC, its criteria were updated in September 2025, so anything that lines your plan up against the old criteria is worth a refresh.
The way I'd read all three is that the strongest evidence you can bring to a visit is the dashboard plus a record of what leadership did about it.
Watch early signals alongside the end results
Retention and graduation rates are the scoreboard. They tell you how things turned out, and a March 2026 piece from the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) describes them as measures that summarize outcomes "after students have already succeeded, stopped out, or departed." That's why the same piece says more institutions are adding earlier signals, like first-year credit momentum, gateway course pass rates, progress milestones and how often students engage with advising.
A six-year graduation rate is the right thing to hold yourself to, but it's a tough thing to manage by, because by the time it moves, the people who could have changed it have often rotated off the committee. So for every goal in the plan I'd pick one or two outcome measures the board cares about and one or two earlier signals the cabinet can actually do something about this year.
For a student success goal, that might look like this:
What the board watches: six-year graduation rate and first-year retention.
What the cabinet watches during the year: first-year credit momentum, gateway course pass rates and advising engagement.
Student success is the clearest example, but the same pattern works for every goal in the plan.
Track the work, too
Here's the layer that gets skipped most often. Under every metric there's a set of initiatives that are supposed to move it, like the advising redesign or the gateway course pilot, and a dashboard can't tell you whether those are actually happening. Whether an initiative is moving is a judgment call, and it lives with the people doing the work.
Metrics tell you whether the plan is working, and initiative progress tells you whether the plan is being worked. You need both.
When a metric doesn't move, the answer is almost always somewhere in the initiatives. Maybe the work hasn't started. Maybe it started and the owner left. Maybe it's done and it didn't help, which is a really valuable thing to learn. If all you have is the metric, you can't tell those apart, and that's how you end up back in the meeting where everyone is guessing.
Here's how the two compare:
The question it answers. Metrics answer "is the plan working?" Initiative progress answers "is the plan being worked?"
Who provides it. Metrics come from institutional research, finance and enrollment. Initiative progress comes from the person who owns each initiative.
How often it changes. Metrics usually change by term or by year. Initiative progress can change every month.
What goes wrong without the other. With only metrics, the number moves and nobody knows why. With only initiative updates, they show up in a dozen formats and nobody can roll them up.
Keep the board view short
The Association of Governing Boards (AGB) has been saying the same thing for years. A board dashboard should be short, tied directly to the strategic plan, and built on data people trust.
On how short, AGB's Trusteeship magazine shared research from Tufts that looked at dashboards from 66 institutions. They ranged from three indicators to 68, and the average was about 29. I'd take that as permission to keep yours on the small side.
A board chair named Greg Bigman made a similar point in Trusteeship a few years later. He wrote that "having a conversation about goals and key performance indicators is key to aligning the board and administration," and he suggested a heat map, a simple color-coded summary, so the board can see progress at a glance without getting lost in department detail. I'd say that's the right split. The board sees the roll-up, and the cabinet keeps the initiative detail underneath it.
Put it on a calendar
No accreditor tells you how often to review, so most universities land on a rhythm that matches how fast each kind of information actually changes. A pattern that works for a lot of institutions:
Cabinet: initiative progress monthly or quarterly.
Board: the dashboard at each board meeting, or quarterly.
Everyone: a full look at outcome metrics once a year.
It can look pretty different from school to school. The same AGB article described Tufts bringing a two-page dashboard to every board meeting, while Pitzer produced theirs once a year in the fall and came back to it during strategy discussions. Both work. What matters is that the schedule is predictable and the people who own the work know when they'll be asked. We wrote more about the rhythm itself in the case for quarterly strategic reviews.
A few universities that show their work
If you're designing a dashboard, it helps to look at a few that are public.
NC State organizes its Wolfpack 2030 metrics around the plan's seven goals, links to an interactive dashboard, and published a three-year update on how it's doing.
UT Arlington shows each strategic plan metric next to its 2030 goal, grouped by area, and holds regular reviews where faculty, staff and stakeholders look at the trends together.
Cornell published metrics for its 2010 to 2015 plan, and the page is older, but the advice on it holds up. It says metrics should be developed with the people being measured, and it warns that metrics "can do harm if action is focused on moving particular numbers or indicators rather than the larger purposes for which they are created."
That Cornell line is the one I'd tape to the wall. A dashboard only keeps leadership aligned if everyone still remembers what the numbers are for.
Why this is harder than it sounds
The trouble is mostly structural. Data lives in different systems, initiative updates come in different formats, and there isn't an easy way to see how one unit's work ties back to an institutional goal. I wrote about this as the onion problem, where the outer layers do good work that never quite connects to the core.
It's common, too. In an October 2024 EDUCAUSE poll, 62% of respondents named data silos as a barrier to analytics, 66% named a lack of expertise or data literacy, and only 20% said most of their departments had adopted analytics.
University systems feel this the most. A central analytics team might already pull data from every campus into one place and build dashboards in a tool like Tableau, and that's valuable work for enrollment, finance and operations. What it can't tell you on its own is whether the thousand-plus initiatives underneath a system-wide plan are moving. The metrics and the initiative tracking have to live together for either one to mean much.
Where to start this planning cycle
You can make real progress on this before you change any software. Here's what I'd work through.
Name one outcome metric for every goal. Keep the board list short. If a goal can't name a metric, have that conversation now.
Add one earlier signal per goal. Ask what would move in the next term or two if the work were on track.
Connect every initiative to a goal, and give it an owner. If an initiative can't say which goal it serves, it's worth a second look. We talked about that same question in where to start your first strategic plan.
Let owners report their own progress. Short and regular beats long and rare, and the closer the update is to the work, the more accurate it'll be.
Put the reviews on the calendar. Decide what the cabinet sees, what the board sees, and when you do the annual look at outcomes.
Write down the definition for every metric. Cornell pairs each metric with its source and definition, and that habit saves a lot of arguments later.
Check your plan against your accreditor's current language. HLC Criterion 4, SACSCOC 7.1 and 7.3, or MSCHE Standard 5, so your evidence is ready when the visit comes.
Where VisionSync fits
This is the part of the problem VisionSync is built for. Once your plan is written, it lives in VisionSync with goals, strategies and initiatives all connected. Every initiative has an owner, owners post their own progress, leaders can see every layer at once, and the board report comes out of the system instead of being stitched together by hand. It was built and used first at UNMC, we're based in Omaha, implementation is hands-on, and a typical go-live is about 90 days.
It doesn't replace your BI tools or your institutional research office. It's the record of what's actually happening against each goal, and that data can be pulled out to sit next to the metrics you already track elsewhere, which is a nice check on whether the work and the numbers are moving together. That matters most at scale. A handful of initiatives in a spreadsheet is manageable. The University of Nebraska tracks more than 1,200 initiatives across four campuses in one live view, and at that size you need one place everyone trusts.
If you're working through how to connect your KPIs to the work behind them, I'm always happy to talk it through or show you how it works.
Frequently asked questions
How many KPIs should a university strategic plan have?
There's no standard number. Research shared by AGB found dashboards ranging from three to 68 indicators, with an average of about 29. I'd keep the board view short and let the detail live underneath it.
What's a good leading indicator in higher education?
AIR points to first-year credit momentum, gateway course pass rates, progress milestones and engagement with advising. They show up well before retention or graduation rates do.
Do accreditors require a KPI dashboard?
Not by name. HLC, SACSCOC and MSCHE all expect data-informed planning and regular review of goals, and MSCHE's criterion 5.5 asks for regular reporting using KPIs, so a dashboard is a natural way to show it. The record of what leadership did with the data matters just as much.
Should the board see initiative-level detail?
Usually not in the main view. A short dashboard tied to the plan, with a heat map or roll-up, keeps the board focused, and the detail stays available for the cabinet and for questions.
Sources
Criteria for Accreditation, Higher Learning Commission, effective September 2025
Standards for Accreditation, Fifteenth Edition, Middle States Commission on Higher Education, effective July 1, 2026
Boardroom Conversations: What Are Our Dashboard Indicators and Benchmarks?, AGB, 2023
From the Board Chair: Aligning Strategic Plans with Outcomes, AGB Trusteeship, May/June 2022
Making Metrics Matter: How to Use Indicators to Govern Effectively, AGB Trusteeship, January/February 2011
What's Worth Measuring Now? Rethinking KPIs in a Changing Higher Education Landscape, Association for Institutional Research, March 31, 2026
EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: Advancing Analytics, EDUCAUSE Review, October 7, 2024
Strategic Metrics, Cornell University Institutional Research and Planning, accessed October 1, 2026
Measuring Our Progress, North Carolina State University, accessed October 1, 2026
Progress Dashboard, University of Texas at Arlington, accessed October 1, 2026
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