COVID-19 Program Response Report for Community Colleges

Emsi is pleased to offer the COVID-19 Program Response Report—a new resource to help community colleges understand and respond to recent job market changes that affect their students.

It’s clear that COVID-19 has caused sudden and significant changes in the U.S. labor market. But for community colleges, it’s critical to understand how these broad, national trends impact their local students and alumni. In turn, this insight can help colleges prioritize and optimize educational offerings in light of a dramatically altered economic landscape.

To help with this work, Emsi has developed the COVID-19 Program Response Report for community colleges.

The report analyzes the recent growth or decline of job markets in your region, focusing on those that are most relevant to your institution’s programs. This data can help you spot programs that are at risk of experiencing lower enrollment from incoming students and diminished job prospects for outgoing completers. At the same time, it also highlights strategic opportunities to help students and alumni pivot into resilient sectors of the economy.

Download an example report, or purchase a customized COVID-19 Response Report for your institution

What’s in the report

The report includes three sections:

1) Regional job posting overview

Start by getting an overview of job posting activity over the last 30 days, with a focus on the industries, employers, and occupations that represent the biggest areas of opportunity in your market. Data points include:

• Recent regional job posting activity vs. prior year
• Companies in your region that have increased posting activity
• Companies in your region that have decreased posting activity
• Industries and occupations with the most unique postings in the last 30 days

2) Program response overview

Get a quick, at-a-glance assessment of how job postings relevant to your programs have changed since the start of the pandemic. For each program at your institution, you’ll see:

• Number of completions (all award levels)
• Average weighted COVID Impact Index (all mapped occupations)
• Average weighted COVID Response Index (all mapped occupations)

3) Key program analysis

Take a deeper dive into 10 programs of particular interest to your institution by seeing the impact and response index for each occupation mapped to a program. For each of the 10 selected programs, this section provides:

• Completions by award level
• Top mapped occupations
• Number of alumni working in each occupation (based on Emsi profiles)
• 2020 regional job count
• COVID Impact Index
• COVID Response Index
• Median regional salary

There are two basic options to customize this portion of the report:

Index methodology

The Program Response Report provides two index numbers to help you quickly assess the direction and magnitude of job posting changes that are relevant to your programs: the COVID Impact Index, and the COVID Response Index.

Both indices leverage Emsi’s program-to-occupation “crosswalk” (adapted from the NCES CIP-to-SOC map) to determine which occupations are likely destinations for students and alumni of a particular program. Using this mapping, we then analyze relevant job postings over three time periods (note that the Impact and Response date ranges are subject to revision as the pandemic unfolds):

The Impact Index is based on the percentage change in daily average new job postings during the “Pre-COVID Period” vs. the “COVID Impact Period.” The Response Index is calculated in the same way, but using the “COVID Impact Period” vs. the “COVID Response Period.”

Both indices use a scale of -5 to +5, as follows:

What next?

Heading into the fall, we understand that your institution faces important decisions about how to adapt programs, services, and recruitment efforts during a time of great uncertainty. The Program Response Report offers a data-driven foundation for making those decisions. As a result, it can help you seize this opportunity to align with evolving market conditions and play a critical role in your community’s reemployment and recovery efforts.

If you’d like to see an example, you can download a free copy of a COVID-19 Program Response Report for community colleges in the state of Idaho. Note that, unlike this state-wide analysis, your college’s report will be tailored to your programs and service region. Also note that the Key Program Analysis section of this report uses the 5-3-2 option rather than the top 10 programs option. Learn more about these options on the report request page.

Explore Emsi’s other COVID-19 resources for higher education or see how our consulting team can help you think strategically and demonstrate value through a program demand gap analysis and economic impact study. If you have any questions or would like to chat, please let us know!

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