The Curricular Analytics Community applies curricular analytics for student retention and graduation by reducing complexity and redesigning degree pathways.
The Curricular Analytics Community is designed to involve faculty and staff in a process that leverages improvement science and curricular analytics tools to support curriculum redesign in higher education. By using curriculum mapping and visualization tools, institutional teams can identify opportunities to reduce complexity and test curricular changes that improve student persistence. High curricular complexity has been consistently linked to lower retention rates, longer time to degree, and unnecessary credit accumulation for students.
The community allows institutions to quickly visualize curricula and then dynamically adjust these visualizations to test how changes impact curricular systems. The process helps participants locate problems of practice and design new ways of supporting student success. Drawing on the characteristics of a Networked Improvement Community, the Curricular Analytics Community has a well-defined aim—curricular redesign that will increase persistence and graduation rates for all students—and is guided by a theory of improvement, allowing members to work in an accelerated way to Plan, Do, Study, and Act.
Institutional teams of at least five people:
Your institution has the option to create a new team or use an existing committee to participate in the Curricular Analytics Community. Team members may vary by campus, but the most successful groups bring together faculty, academic affairs leaders, institutional research staff, and student success professionals to design and implement retention strategies that improve persistence and graduation rates.
How You’ll Benefit:
Reductions in complexity correlate with:
Institutions can use curricular analytics tools to map and visualize degree pathways, making it easy to spot where prerequisites, bottlenecks, or excess requirements slow student progress. By analyzing these patterns, faculty and staff can redesign curricula to reduce complexity, which leads to improved retention and higher graduation rates.
By participating in a curricular analytics community, institutions gain access to peer insights, best practices, and collaborative problem-solving. This shared learning environment helps teams test solutions faster and adopt proven strategies to support student success.
The Curricular Analytics Community guides institutions in creating structured action plans tied to measurable outcomes. This ensures teams can track progress, assess impact, and demonstrate improvements in student persistence and on-time degree completion.
Fees are based on undergraduate enrollment as determined by College Navigator. Fees are assessed per institution, not per individual.
Undergraduate Enrollment:
Data visualizations help your team take a deeper look at various systems that affect students. Graphic representations help your team build support and communicate across your institution. Invite your team to use multiple data sources to visualize and contextualize curricular systems and design for improved student outcomes.
Curriculum redesign in higher education is important because complex degree pathways often delay graduation, lower retention, and increase unnecessary credits. By using curricular analytics to map and simplify programs of study, institutions can improve student persistence and help more students graduate on time.
Application for the Fall 2025 cohort is now available. You can apply at this link.
Applicants are accepted on a first come, first served basis; subject to approval. Early registration is recommended. Fall 2025 Application deadline is September 5, 2025.
Institutional teams of at least five people:
The synchronous meetings will be 1-2:30pm Eastern time:
You will receive an application confirmation email within 1 week of applying. An agreement will be sent to the person designated in the application. Once the agreement has been signed you will receive further information from the Academy facilitators. Please contact info@gardnerinstitute.org with any questions.
The Curricular Analytics Community helps improve student persistence by using curricular analytics to map and visualize programs of study, identify barriers, and streamline degree pathways. By reducing unnecessary complexity and applying improvement science, institutions make it easier for students to stay on track and graduate on time.
The Curricular Analytics Community provides a structured, data-informed process to redesign curricula, document improvement cycles, and demonstrate measurable progress on student retention and graduation — all key expectations in accreditation reviews.
Curricular analytics offers clear visualizations of degree pathways, helping institutions identify bottlenecks, reduce unnecessary complexity, and present evidence-based improvements during program review cycles.
Institutions gain a uniform method to analyze programs of study, test curricular changes, and show how adjustments lead to higher persistence and completion rates, strengthening institutional effectiveness reports.
Teams can document their use of improvement science, data-driven curriculum mapping, and streamlined pathways as evidence of continuous improvement in student success.
“The Curricular Analytics Community tools helped us to look deeply into the various systems that affect our students, to identify causes of delays and unintended obstacles, and to consider why systems were designed in certain ways. More than that, these tools led us from those analyses to action plans that we can implement immediately.”
Sarah L. Peters, Ph.D.
Associate Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies, East Central University
"My advice to everyone is to find that core group to work with and become each other's champions! Begin the work, and then figure out how to sell it back to the rest of the organization. Get leaders and collegues involved, show them what is possible."
Mike Wangler
Dean of Math and Sciences at Chaffey College
"As an office of one, it has been really nice to look at a broader initiative of utilizing curricular analysis to identify new opportunities for enhancing curriculum development."
Karen Girton-Snyder
Director of Curriculum & Learning initiatives
