Associate Director
Education
Yale University, BA
University of Chicago, MBA
About
Kathy Wise works with Charlie and Kelly to lead HEDS. In her work, Kathy’s goal is to help faculty, staff, administrators, and students find ways to gather, make sense of, and use evidence to improve the impact of courses, majors, programs, and — in the end— colleges and universities overall.
To accomplish this goal, Kathy spends much of her time visiting colleges and universities conducting workshops, giving presentations, providing guidance, reviewing programs, helping with assessment activities for grants, interviewing students, and assisting faculty and staff to determine ways to evaluate and strengthen the impact of their work with students.
Prior to joining HEDS, Kathy held various positions as she searched for a career that would allow her to provide a meaningful service to the world while connecting her skills and aptitudes. She has explored social work, worked in human resources on Wall Street, and worked in finance at a pharmaceutical company. Kathy believes her work at HEDS allows her to fulfill that goal every day.
Kathy also strongly believes HEDS can help colleges and universities improve and says, “Institutions are facing enormous pressure to do assessment, and while there’s a lot of activity going on, our sense is that much of the assessment that’s being done meets the requirements of accreditors but has trouble filtering back into the work that faculty and staff do with students. So, while institutions have a lot of data and reports, that work is often not useful for faculty and staff. Our goal is to help faculty and staff see how assessment can help them in the work they do every day with students, and to help them find ways to make assessment ongoing and sustainable.”