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The OLDC recently welcomed a new director, Dr. Michelle Hodara. Dr. Hodara is trained as an education researcher and has a Ph.D. in Economics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. For nearly 13 years, she has been leading applied research and evaluation at Education Northwest, a Portland-based non-profit. Many of her projects have used education and workforce data and focused on Oregon K12 and postsecondary students.
She has experience sharing research through innovative and accessible ways and was recently featured in the Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) documentary Class of 2025: Growing up in Oregon schools that followed the class of 2025 and reported on the state's high school graduation rate progress. Dr. Hodara is excited to join the OLDC and help advance its mission to support objective analysis and reliable conclusions based on robust cross-sector, longitudinal data and its vision to provide actionable data to identify the impact of educational programs, policies, and investments to help individuals and communities in Oregon thrive.
The Higher Education Coordinating Commission is hiring a Senior Research and Data Analyst for the OLDC. This is a full-time, permanent career opportunity. The application deadline is 1/20/26. Read more about the position and apply here:
Over the past year, OLDC completed a major upgrade to the way we process and prepare data for research. We moved our data pipelines into Azure Databricks, a modern cloud-based platform that allows us to work faster, handle larger datasets, and automate more of our processes. All of this work takes place in a highly secure environment that prioritizes the privacy of student data. These upgrades help us deliver cleaner, more timely data to agency partners and support more complex analyses with great availability.
In the coming year, we are evaluating how we match individual records across agencies, a critical step for producing accurate longitudinal data. We will be evaluating new tools and methods to ensure our matching process remains accurate, efficient, and aligned with best practices as our data and partner needs continue to grow.
Starting in 2026, the OLDC will begin focusing on the next two projects:
- Embarking on a student pathways project that will include a student pathways interactive dashboard and research briefs about Oregon public school students’ education and career pathways and outcomes. The dashboard will build on an early OLDC education pathway product using more recent data and allow the public to better understand Oregon students’ educational attainment and workforce outcomes.
- Updating the Educator Workforce Dashboard with data from 2023 through 2025. The audience for this dashboard is educator preparation programs and other partners who are interested in exploring licensure recommendations, hiring, and retention for public school teachers in Oregon.
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