Please send your CV, a sample of your most relevant work (link or attachment), and your usual hourly billing rate (if you already have consulting experience) to nate.johnson@postsecondaryanalytics.com. No cover letter is needed or requested for now.

Are you motivated by work that will help make state and national postsecondary policy more effective, student-centered, and equitable? We are looking for part-time 1099 subcontract consultants help to support new and ongoing projects involving common postsecondary data sets. Key responsibilities would include

• creating or updating 50-state or multi-state analyses of IPEDS data, especially (but not limited to) public institution enrollment, finance, and completion data
• developing static and interactive presentations based on those data in a variety of formats: Excel, PowerPoint, Google sheets/slides, Tableau, etc.
• documenting the data sets
• contributing to projects in other ways depending on skills and experience
• committing to 2-3 years or more of maintenance and updates as needed or requested.

The primary qualification we are looking for right now is experience in analyzing 50-state IPEDS data, especially enrollment, finance and completions. You should have several years experience working with these data, including multiple projects that require aggregating data at the state level and comparing data across states. (With this kind of experience, you should know why Colorado's finance data are odd, or why it is tricky to analyze long-term state- and national-level trends in two-year colleges...)

In addition, other helpful but less essential qualifications could include:

• experience working with other large public datasets including, in rough priority order: College Scorecard, American Community Survey microdata, Census, Master School Files, NPSAS, Current Population Survey
• experience creating interactive Tableau dashboards
• familiarity with academic research on postsecondary finance and student success
• strong journalist-style writing skills
• strong qualitative research and evaluation skills
• experience at the institution level as an IPEDS data reporter
• programming skills for quantitative research (R, SAS, STATA, SPSS, etc.)
• expertise in inferential statistics, especially for causal inference (difference-in-difference, regression discontinuity, etc.)

Postsecondary Analytics is a small consulting firm that focuses on projects and clients that seek to maximize the impact of investments in student success. We help clients formulate questions that will help drive decisions, then bring primary and secondary research to bear to help answer those questions. 

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