UDRC 2019 – A Year in Review

Jeremias Solari, Assistant Director
January 08, 2020

udrc

This past year, 2019, was a critical year for the Utah Data Research Center and its continued success. Below is a list of our major accomplishments:

  • Three major research reports were completed:
    • “2019 Longitudinal Intergenerational Poverty Research” (Kelsey A. Martinez, Ph.D.)
    • “Return on Investment of Career and Technical Education Provided by UTech” (Skylar Scott)
    • “Academic Success of Utah’s Working College Students” (Allison Stapleton-Shrivastava)
    • One additional research product on workforce retention of postsecondary graduates is nearing completion as I type this blog post.
  • Completed the agreement with Utah Department of Health (UDOH) to receive data (birth and death certificates here we come!)
  • Had our first official data releases for a data partner (Utah System of Higher Education (USHE - Launch My Career) and for external researchers (data for a senior thesis).
  • Significantly improved our policies and procedures, especially the ones around our day-to-day work.
  • Hosted, what we hope to be an annual occasion, our “Bagels and Research” event although if we cannot keep finding people to pay for the bagels, it may just have to be “Research.”
  • Expanded the team to include an additional user experience (UX) researcher and data coordinator.
  • Implemented serious and significant improvements in our matching and de-identification system.
  • Had multiple presentations at the national State Longitudinal Data Systems annual conference and others.
  • Won the 2019 Best of Utah Award for best collaboration.

Looking into some of the things we have to do in 2020 to continue to be successful, I see that we have a serious amount of work ahead of us-sorry team! We need to focus on continuing to produce valuable and objective research, continue to enhance our data system and the amount of data available (add more data to the UDRC). Innovate and invent within the P-20W+ space.

All of this work completed in 2019 and will be in 2020, was and is impossible without the hard work and dedication of the UDRC’s staff (you guys are outstanding!), the backing of the executive director’s office here at Workforce Services, the continued collaboration with our data partners, the support provided by the SLDS State Support Team and the Department of Education team. We thank you in helping the UDRC be a possible.