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College of Lake County

Scaling a Culture of Evidence: How CLC Strengthened Access, Persistence, and Completion

10%

Growth in college credit hours

79%

First-to-second term retention

+10 pts

Increase in graduation rate

5,165

Degrees and certificates awarded in FY25

71%

Increase in credentials awarded since FY19

The Situation

The College of Lake County is a comprehensive community college established to meet the postsecondary needs of Lake County, Illinois, part of the greater Chicagoland region. With its primary campus in Grayslake and additional campuses serving communities including Waukegan and Vernon Hills, CLC provides accessible learning and workforce preparation across a geographically and economically diverse area.

CLC serves students pursuing multiple goals – transfer, workforce credentials, and upskilling – alongside adults balancing employment, family responsibilities, and financial constraints. In that environment, the details of the student experience matter: whether students can register into the right classes at the right time, whether early momentum in college-credit math and English is improving, and whether the institution can understand what happens after completion, including transfer and career outcomes. CLC’s mission and institutional priorities reflect this broad responsibility to students and communities, emphasizing high-quality education and partnerships that advance the communities it serves.

To meet these expectations, CLC has been deliberately strengthening a culture of inquiry and evidence. Historically, however, the institution relied heavily on a centralized institutional research office, which limited how quickly teams could explore questions and evaluate whether interventions were working at scale. When insight primarily moves through reporting requests, the pace of improvement can lag behind the pace of student need – especially during active registration cycles and in students’ first year, when timing can be decisive.

At the same time, CLC was pursuing sustained improvements across the student journey aligned to its Lancer Success Framework and strategic priorities, including a sharpened focus on post-completion success, such as transfer outcomes. That combination – ambitious goals across access, progress, completion, and next-step outcomes, paired with a need to broaden evidence-informed work beyond a small set of analysts – created a clear requirement for more institution-wide visibility into student trends and results.

The Solution

To support this shift, College of Lake County partnered with ZogoTech to strengthen its data foundation and broaden access to decision-ready insight across the College. The focus was practical: enable leaders and teams to see what is happening across the student journey early enough to respond, and to do so using shared definitions that support coordinated action.

CLC operationalized this approach by building a suite of dashboards fueled by ZogoTech data that bring together enrollment, student demographics, course success, and momentum and completion metrics in a meaningful way for stakeholders. The dashboards were paired with training support and clear expectations for use, helping employees across departments engage directly with the data and evaluate whether interventions are having the intended impact.

CLC uses ZogoTech in several distinct, student-centered ways:

  • Enrollment monitoring from the start of each registration cycle: Teams track trends early and use point-in-time comparisons between the current year and prior years for the same semester. This supports timely decisions about outreach and class offerings while the registration cycle is still active.
  • Tracking placement and progress in math and English: CLC monitors entering students’ placement levels and tracks progress each semester through math and English pathways. This supports a key first-year momentum goal: increasing the share of students who complete college-credit math and English within their first year.
  • Understanding transfer outcomes aligned to the 2030 Strategic Plan: ZogoTech’s ability to integrate National Student Clearinghouse data helps the College track transfer outcomes, monitor progress against strategic plan goals, and guide improvement efforts over time.

Nick Branson, Assistant Vice President, Strategic Advancement, describes how this model supports daily leadership work and cross-functional planning: “I use data in my work each day to monitor key indicators of student access, progress, and success. The data allows me to partner with other leaders at the institution to plan strategic actions to influence the trends we see in a positive direction. Students cannot afford for us to guess at how to improve our institution. It is the data, compiled and made meaningful through the partnership with ZogoTech, that allows us to make evidence-informed, strategic decisions that maximize student success.”

“The dashboards that are fueled by ZogoTech have transformed how we use data within our department. Having quick access to consistent, reliable data improved our ability to monitor retention at key intervals such as second term, second year and third year. Using the data more effectively helps inform our student resource work and drives decisions to support student engagement.“
Dr. Eric Tammes
Director, Student Academic Success, College of Lake County

The Benefits

CLC’s evidence-informed strategy has translated into measurable gains in access, persistence, and completion. Over seven years of aligned improvement efforts, the College has used data to pinpoint where change would matter most, select interventions with clear rationale, and track whether those efforts are producing results for students.

  • Enrollment strength and progress toward strategic targets: CLC reports that its redesigned onboarding, first-year experience, and advising model helped the College exceed its FY24 and FY25 enrollment targets and remain on track to exceed its FY26 target. By the end of FY26, CLC expects to achieve 10% growth in college credit hours (from 202,833 to 223,800) and 19% growth in all credits, including dual credit and adult education (from 237,655 to 282,800), compared with FY23.
  • Improved retention, including gains for students facing the largest institutional performance gaps: CLC documented improvement in first-to-second term retention, increasing from 74% (fall 2017 baseline) to 79% (fall 2024 cohort). The College also reports stronger gains among student groups that experienced the largest institutional performance gaps: +8 percentage points for Black students, +4 for Latinx students, and +7 for part-time students. Course success improved over this period as well, contributing to stronger term-to-term persistence.
  • Higher graduation rates and historic credential completion: CLC’s three-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time, credential-seeking students increased ten percentage points, from 29% (fall 2015 cohort) to 39% (fall 2022 cohort), with improvement across demographic groups. In FY25 (ending June 2025), CLC awarded the second-highest number of degrees and certificates in its history – 5,165 awards to 3,576 unique students – surpassed only by FY13, when implementation of an auto-awarding process created a one-year anomaly. CLC also reports a 16% increase in graduates, including a 40% rise in graduates from workforce-aligned certificate programs, and a 71% increase in all credentials from FY19 to FY25.
  • Greater coherence from strategy to execution: CLC aligned multiple interventions – onboarding redesign, advising reforms, faculty professional learning, developmental education pathway changes, and resource investments – within its Lancer Success Framework. This created reinforcement across the student experience, connecting improvements in early momentum and support to longer-term persistence and completion.
  • Stronger student success practice at key intervals: With clearer visibility into retention checkpoints such as second term, second year, and third year, student success teams can better monitor where engagement is weakening and adjust resource strategies accordingly. Dr. Eric Tammes, Director, Student Academic Success, summarizes what this has meant in practice: “The dashboards that are fueled by ZogoTech have transformed how we use data within our department. Having quick access to consistent, reliable data improved our ability to monitor retention at key intervals such as second term, second year, and third year. Using the data more effectively helps inform our student resource work and drives decisions to support student engagement.”

Together, these outcomes reflect an institution that paired a clear student success strategy with the discipline to measure progress, learn from results, and sustain improvements over time – resulting in more students persisting, completing credentials, and progressing toward transfer and workforce goals. As a result of College of Lake County’s intentional use of data to inform strategy that has improved student outcomes, the College has been recognized nationally as an Achieving the Dream Leader College in 2023 and Leader College of Distinction in 2025.