For nearly 20 years, Drew Lurker has focused on how institutions use data and systems to support student progression and completion. As assistant vice president for student records and collegewide registrar at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana, he led large-scale initiatives to improve degree audit, expand transfer articulation and leverage data to increase credential attainment, including the establishment of more than 31,000 course equivalencies and significant growth in annual credentials awarded.
Now serving as client strategy executive at CollegeSource, Lurker works with colleges and universities to strengthen academic mobility and apply data-driven strategies that create clearer, more actionable pathways for students.
Q: Transfer is often cited as a key challenge in student success, even as institutions invest in articulation agreements and transfer tools. From your experience as a registrar, where do you see remaining gaps in transparency or structural/data alignment that prevent these efforts from consistently helping students understand how their credits apply toward a degree?
A: Over the past decade, higher ed has invested countless hours and resources in developing transfer agreements and academic pathways to help students plan their education. Those efforts created a strong transfer ecosystem, but the nature of transfer itself has evolved. Historically, transfer was primarily associated with community college students moving to a four-year institution or students seeking to transition from open-access institutions to more prestigious institutions. While that remains true, a new population has emerged, pushing conversations about transfer and academic planning much earlier in the student journey, exacerbating the transparency issue.
In my experience, incoming high school graduates increasingly arrive with multiple transcripts and forms for college-equivalent credit. Aggregating and evaluating all those sources is not simple, and that complexity poses challenges for student advising and helping [students] make informed decisions about their academic path. At a time when trust in higher education is under pressure, institutions need to make the best good-faith effort to recognize and apply students’ prior learning.
The adoption of transfer tools has helped students to self-report coursework and better understand where they receive credit. However, most of these tools are designed to highlight opportunities at a single institution rather than to provide a broader view of a student’s options. Maintenance also remains a major challenge. Curriculum changes are evolving rapidly to align with changing workforce needs, meaning agreements created today may shift before a student ultimately transfers.
Equally important to showing students if a course transfers is how a course transfers. Too often, students discover that course credits apply only as electives and do little to advance progress toward a specific degree. For transfer initiatives to be successful, they must increase transparency, reduce maintenance burdens and provide students with a clearer understanding of how their learning applies to meaningful academic progress.
Q: There is a growing focus on “degree discovery” and mapping clearer academic pathways. What does effective degree discovery look like in practice, and how can it influence both retention and time to completion?
A: This is a critical issue, particularly as the growing population of students with some college and no degree is often viewed as a broader reflection of the ongoing higher ed challenges. To effectively tackle this problem, institutions need to move away from static semester-by-semester plans and adopt a dynamic, proactive approach to academic planning and milestone tracking.
Historically, institutions relied on static documents and students self-identifying for graduation. That model was palatable when a majority of our students followed a fairly linear path through college. Today’s students’ paths are far more complex. Effective degree discovery means creating systems that continuously evaluate a student’s progress and identify opportunities in real time. Static PDFs and rigid checklists are no longer sufficient. Students increasingly expect personalized guidance that adapts as their goals and circumstances evolve.
During my time in the registrar’s office, we implemented a proactive degree-discovery initiative in partnership with IT, data analytics teams and CollegeSource. The system identified students who were near completion, actively completing requirements or had already earned credentials they had not formally claimed. Often, students pursuing one credential were unaware they had also completed stackable certificates or additional milestones along the way. Recognizing these achievements was sometimes a student’s first academic success, showing them they could succeed in their educational pursuits. Additionally, we found that the students who earned a milestone credential were retained at a higher rate.
By identifying achievements as they happened, we increased the number of credentials awarded from approximately 13,000 to over 35,000 annually within a few years. This proactive approach also resulted in the student staying enrolled and acknowledged the value of the learning the institution provided and contributed to the state’s strategic goals of creating a more educated, workforce-ready population.
Q: Institutions often talk about being “data-driven,” but many struggle to operationalize that in meaningful ways. What separates institutions that successfully use data to improve student outcomes from those that remain stuck in analysis without action?
A: In my experience, the institutions that move beyond analysis paralysis are the ones that stay focused on a clear outcome. Over the last several years, access to institutional data has increased exponentially. We have gone from hard-coded reports to AI tools that can surface insights instantly. This access to data has led many into the trap of putting everything into a dashboard, resulting in the inevitable “[if you] measure everything, you measure nothing.”
At Ivy Tech, our focus was to issue 50,000 credentials each academic year. To achieve this goal, we made many changes; some were small, others were transformational, but they were all tied to a clearly defined objective.
Second, institutions that do this well are data-informed rather than data-led. Being data-informed means putting data in the hands of the people who can best understand its context. Registrars, advisers and front-line staff often have a deeper understanding of the why behind the numbers than a dashboard alone can provide. Being overly data-driven can lead to chasing numbers without evaluating the why behind the metrics. When you empower your faculty and staff to help you understand the data, your interventions and programs will become more effective.
At Ivy Tech, that mindset helped us find the right partner to create a degree discovery system that solved the underlying problem. We were able to identify data opportunities, simplify processes and proactively recognize student achievements. The reports and tools we created were designed to make people’s jobs easier, not to create another layer of oversight or pressure. The goal was to make everyone’s job easier so that we could serve our students. When we began making measurable progress toward a major institutional goal, we knew we were using data in a way that affected real change at the institution and in students’ lives.
