Creating Institutional Transformation
Using the Equity Scorecard
By Abbie Robinson-Armstrong, vice president
for intercultural affairs; Derenda King, intercultural
associate; David Killoran, professor and chair of Department
of English; Henry Ward, director of intercultural affairs;
Matthew X. Fissinger, director of admissions; and Lorianne
Harrison, associate director for residence life—all
at Loyola Marymount University
Loyola Marymount University (LMU) launched the “equity
scorecard” in 2002 to support the university’s
new strategic plan, which aims in part to “actively
promote diversity in the student body, faculty, and
staff and to create a more vibrant student culture through
an enhanced intellectual environment.” The equity
scorecard is one of the most effective diversity assessment
tools available, and we have used it to convince faculty
and staff of the need for change and to provide a structure
of accountability. By using the scorecard to stimulate
discussion and action within individual strategic units,
faculty and administrators have transformed the institution,
effecting measurable outcomes across multiple departments
and programs.
Estela Bensimon’s team at the University of Southern
California designed the scorecard to address the problem
“that equity, while valued in principle at many
institutions, is not regularly measured in relation
to educational outcomes for specific groups of students.”
Bensimon describes the scorecard as a diversity assessment
tool that “foster[s] institutional change in higher
education by helping to close the achievement gap for
historically underrepresented students” (Bensimon
2004, 45). The scorecard encourages institutions to
develop a consultative process that incorporates both
the broad-based needs of the institution and those of
specific institutional units and strategic programs.
By requiring measurable accountability, it promotes
institutional change.
LMU’s Use of the Scorecard
Equity scorecards focus attention on educational equity
and use quantitative data to assess progress in four
perspectives: (1) access, (2) retention, (3) educational
excellence, and (4) institutional viability. Such units
as the registrar’s or financial aid office collect
data, which we disaggregate by ethnicity and gender
to determine an institution’s “score”
in each of these perspectives. The scorecard’s
innovation lies in part in its system for evaluating
the subjective dimensions of excellence and viability.
To evaluate educational excellence, we consider ethnicity
and gender in relation to such factors as the dean’s
list, four-year graduation rates, the top ten percent
in GPA distribution, and pass/fail rates in gatekeeper
courses. We evaluate institutional viability by considering
the faculty and staff’s ethnicity, gender, and
institutional rank, and identifying how these are related.
LMU has expanded the use of equity scorecards by applying
the scorecard to individual strategic units within the
university: separate colleges and schools, the honors
program, the athletics program, the study abroad program,
and the university library, for example. Each unit compares
the data in all four scorecard perspectives to the profile
of the overall student body to determine where education
gaps exist. We then amalgamate these individual scorecards
to create the institutional equity scorecard. We define
equity as the point at which a particular ethnic group’s
representation across all academic indicators—majors,
programs, honors, graduation, and degrees awarded—is
relatively equal to the group’s representation
in the student body.
LMU’s deans appoint members to serve on a scorecard
team. These members lead their respective units’
initiatives to review their data and to implement programmatic
responses where necessary. The team meets every few
months to discuss successes and challenges and to provide
support. Through team members, individual units maintain
control of their equity initiatives: they must identify
their action areas and meet their chosen goals. The
president holds each unit accountable for change: after
a two-year period, the committee reassesses the data
and reports to the president at a town-hall style meeting.
LMU’s president led the scorecard initiative,
so the administration supported it from its inception.
Nevertheless, we faced challenges as we began to implement
the scorecard. Often faculty and staff responded to
quantitative data analysis with discomfort, and we had
to contend with a culture that did not support its use.
Five years after the project’s initiation, however,
the LMU community has widely accepted the scorecard;
some departments have even voluntarily implemented it.
Scorecard Outcomes
With the help of a Campus Diversity Initiative grant
from the James Irvine Foundation, we responded to the
scorecard results by establishing a number of programs
across the university. The synergy created by the interaction
of the strategic plan, equity scorecard, and diversity
initiatives provided ideological and financial support
for transforming the institution. Although we cannot
possibly describe every new program implemented or recount
every outcome, several examples illustrate the encompassing
scope of transformation.
The student body’s diversity and levels of achievement
have vastly improved. Before the scorecard was used,
Asian/ Pacific Islander student enrollment percentages
had decreased. After launching the equity scorecard,
Asian/Pacific Islander enrollment increased from 12
percent in 2002 to 14 percent in 2005. Previously, we
did not collect data on the percentages of underrepresented
students who applied for national and international
scholarships; as of fall 2005, we established baseline
data, and we now aim to increase the number of students
of color who apply for and are awarded these scholarships.
We have also increased the percentages of students of
color invited into the University Honors Program. In
2002, African Americans comprised 1.9 percent of students
in the program; in 2005, they comprised 2.4 percent.
Latino shares grew from 6.7 percent to 8.3 percent in
the same period.
Many departments have likewise made considerable gains
in diversifying their faculty and curricula. For example,
the history department reported a near doubling in the
percentages of female faculty members since instituting
the scorecard. LMU has instituted new forms of faculty
support, including a popular faculty development program
on inclusive teaching that provides ongoing pedagogical
support for new tenure-track faculty members in their
second year of teaching. Departments have also instituted
curricular change: one example comes from the classics
and archaeology department, where a professor used a
Transformation of Courses in the Major grant to develop
a new text to engage students of color in Latin classes.
By using the equity scorecard, LMU has found a way
to draw attention to inequity and to motivate change.
The equity scorecard inspired us to seek outcomes that
included new departmental and institutional structures;
changes in policies, pedagogies, curriculum, and budgets,
and in student learning and assessment practices; and
shifts in the language campus administrators use to
talk about the university. Not only has the equity scorecard
helped the university make clear and compelling cases
to key stakeholders about why things must be done differently,
but it has pushed faculty and staff to craft a sensible
agenda that focuses on improvement without assigning
blame. The equity scorecard has stimulated debate about
critical academic issues (including academic climate,
faculty retention, faculty recruitment and hiring, access,
and student success). In doing so, it has allowed faculty
and staff to simultaneously work within a culture and
challenge that culture’s comfort zone in pursuit
of change.
The
Original Diversity Scorecard:
Making the Need for Change Visible |
| Estela Mara
Bensimon described the original diversity scorecard
initiative upon which the equity scorecard is
based as follows:
“With the exception of historically black
institutions and tribal colleges, intra-institutional
stratification based on race and ethnicity is
a reality within most higher education institutions,
regardless of whether they are predominantly white,
open-access, or classified as Hispanic Serving
Institutions. However, the specificities of this
intra-institutional stratification are largely
invisible because equity in educational outcomes
does not constitute a metric of institutional
performance that is continuously tracked. . .
. The core principle of the Diversity Scorecard
is that evidence (i.e., factual data) about the
state of equity in educational outcomes for African
Americans and Latinos can have a powerful effect
on increasing the recognition by faculty members,
administrators, counselors, and others about the
existence of inequities as well as their motivation
to resolve them. That is, in order to bring about
institutional change, individuals have to see,
on their own, as clearly as possible, the magnitude
of inequities, rather than having researchers,
like us, tell them that they exist.”
For more on the diversity scorecard, see
E. M. Bensimon, D. Polkinghorne, and G. Bauman,
“The Accountability Side of Diversity,”
Diversity Digest 7 (July 2003): 1–2, www.diversityweb.org/Digest/vol7no1-2/bensimon.cfm.
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Reference
Bensimon, E. M. 2004. The diversity scorecard: A learning
approach to institutional change. Change (January/
February): 44–52.
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