After becoming a Research Data Analyst at Calbright two years ago, Logan Rowland now finds herself right where she wants to be: on the forefront of using data to drive meaningful change in higher education.
“The opportunity that Calbright provides for innovation and experimentation is a really rare opportunity to have in education,” she said. “Calbright operates differently. It takes risks and experiments and asks the right questions, and the work I’m doing is diving into these really important questions and finding insights, finding answers, in the data. That really sets Calbright apart for me.”
Growing up in North Carolina, Logan realized in high school that she had a passion for statistics, and what they can do.
“My junior year in high school, I was taking a statistics class, and realized how embedded data is in every aspect of our lives,” she said. “It’s so foundational and fundamental to every subject, every industry. And I had all these interests. I cared about STEM, but I also cared about politics, about sociology and how people interact, and about how the real world affects people, how individuals live their daily lives. And I realized: Everything I cared about across all these different fields can be made stronger, can be made more digestible, can be made more actionable by applying statistical techniques. Working with data really checked all my boxes. It has technical rigor and can help improve social systems and individual people’s experiences.
By the end of the class, Logan decided to work with data and apply statistical methods to whatever challenges she felt most need addressing.
At the time, she hadn’t thought that would be education. But as she went through college her older sister became a high school teacher, “and I could really see from her experience the impact that she was having on students and also the importance of educational systems. Education had been so important to me, I learned the value of education, and now through my sister I could see how many other students were struggling. And so it really felt to me like: I’ve got this set of skills, I want to do something in public service, this is how I can help.”
Logan applied for a job as an analyst at a nonprofit that uses student survey feedback to make improvements in grades 3-12. She was thrilled to get it right out of college. To the distress of her family, that job was in San Francisco.
“I’d never been to California before, and my family was really dismayed, they were like ‘please, please, please, don’t go so far away!’” she said. “It’s probably the most impulsive thing I’ve ever done. But this job was something I really wanted to do, and I felt like it was that time in my life when I hadn’t put down strong roots, I didn’t own any property. And I was committed. I just kept thinking: ‘Why not?’”
Like so many people, Logan moved to California for a job but fell in love with the state. She loves going for hikes around the beautiful Bay Area. She loves attending Golden State Valkyries games at Chase Center and Giants games at Oracle Park. She loves trips to museums like the Academy of Sciences and the Museum of Modern Art. She loves the music scene, seeing new shows with friends.
And she loved her analyst job, which she stayed at for five years.
“I became a veteran on the team. At one point I was a senior analyst, and then promoted to associate manager.” It was a great experience, but she began to want new challenges. “I wanted to spread my wings and move into higher education, and find new ways to be of service.”
That’s when she found Calbright.
“Calbright is a testament to innovation,” she said. “We’re trying to build something new. We’re trying to disrupt the educational system in a way that is responsive to the needs of communities and populations that aren’t always prioritized by traditional educational models and institutions. So working at Calbright is an opportunity to really get my hands in complex data, to understand the needs of the communities we serve, and meet those needs.”
She added, “At Calbright, we’re always iterating to understand what works and what doesn’t. And that’s very satisfying to me, on a technical level and on the way I want to be of service. Calbright really stands apart.”
As a Research Data Analyst at Calbright, a day for Logan might include creating and maintaining institutional dashboards, generating reports or conducting analyses for different departments and teams, designing research projects, putting together forecasts and equity analyses about a wide range of subjects including student demographics, graduation rates, persistence rates, time to certificate completion, student engagement, post-Calbright student outcomes like wage and upward mobility, and more.
She’s thrilled to say she’s learned a lot. “Working at a place like Calbright, which is nimble and fast moving in a way that most educational institutions aren’t, has been really informative. The senior analysts on our team have been great resources for me to understand new ways of approaching research problems. I’ve also learned a lot about the concerted effort that you need to coordinate a lot of moving pieces in a larger system, ensuring we’re all moving toward our mission together. We’re putting together highly intricate solutions to complex problems.”
But the most satisfying part is that she knows she’s making a difference.
“There’s an adage that says: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. And I feel that very deeply. The research team I’m on works to measure the right things, the things that are most important to millions of adult Californians looking to access education, so that the data can be used to make the right strategic decisions. And also to help people who work directly with students understand what people need as individuals. It’s a great challenge, and the right one for me.”
