I have two ideas both of which I hope will help me and my coleagues gain a better understanding of the unique challenges that the students face at CUNY Bronx Community College (the school where I work).
I recently attended a faculty day talk on food security issues for BCC students and would like to do a comparison of the food security issues at BCC vs. other demographic groups or national averages.
The presenter at the food security talk invited us to work with her on her research and contact her for access to the data, so I don’t think that it will be a problem to get the BCC data.
National food security data is available here:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-security-in-the-united-states/documentation/
The second idea is to do a comparison of BCC retention and graduation rates as compared with national averages. I believe I can get BCC data from the BCC Office of Institutional Research. I can also get some yearly totals data here: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/city-university-of-new-york-cuny-university-retention-and-graduation-rates-beginning-1990.
National data for graduation and retention rates is available here: https://usedgov.github.io/api/mbk.html
Although it looks like the same data is also available as a csv file here: https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/statistics/surveys/mbk/index.html
More data here: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/documentation/
The biggest challenge I am having is acquiring data from different types of data sources. I am most interested in the food security issue, but everything I am finding seems to be in csv or similar format. The graduation and retention rates I am pretty confident would not be new information, I am sure the school has probably already done this, so I’m less interested in pursuing that idea.