Beck retires after 28 years of analyzing university by its numbers

There aren’t many people at UW–Madison who can say their work has a special place on desks across campus.

But as the driving force behind many of the metrics used in the university’s Data Digest and other campus reports, Bruce Beck, senior policy and planning analyst in the Office of Academic Planning and Analysis, has helped create vital resources that are regularly consulted by deans, department chairs, faculty committees, UW System administrators and reporters writing about the university.

Beck retired from the university on Wednesday (March 28), leaving much the same job he started here in 1983.

“I’ve had a good time working for the university – I’ve enjoyed it and I’ve been proud of the fact I’ve worked here,” he says.

His responsibilities have expanded over the years, but he has continued to work on many of the same issues, such as trends in grade distribution and how faculty salaries compare with those at peer institutions.

“He has a knack for taking things that are really complex when you open up the box and look inside, and finding a way to explain it,” says Jocelyn Milner, director of the Office of Academic Planning and Analysis, who has worked with Beck since 1999. “That’s the kind of thing that takes some experience – the kind of experience that builds up over time – and that’s going to walk out the door with Bruce.”

The Data Digest, which Beck helped create in 1997, tells the story of the university through numbers – offering nuggets about students, faculty and staff from the ACT scores of new freshmen (page 21) to the number of patents filed by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation over the last decade (page 63). Then-provost John Wiley had seen a similar product from Iowa State University and asked Beck and his colleagues to produce something similar.

The graphic-heavy design allows for simpler trend tracking, Beck says.

“We tried to focus on trends, which we think is helpful as an indicator of how things are going,” he says. “Many of the indicators are relatively stable, which is a good thing.”

And just as his job has remained much the same, so have the tools he uses to do it. One of the reports Beck has kept current is stored on a mainframe computer now housed at DoIT.

“There are these lingering resources on the mainframe and I happen to know how to work in that environment,” he says, adding that he’s written a training manual for those who will be assuming his responsibilities going forward.

In addition to reports generated with campus data, Beck has been involved in projects to share data among other institutions.

For many years, he was the university’s representative with the Association of American Universities Data Exchange, to which 62 other institutions contribute, allowing them all to run comparative analyses on a host of measures, such as how long it takes undergraduates to finish their degrees.

In addition to his work with campus data, Beck spent many years on the Academic Staff Executive Committee, serving as its chair from 2004 to 2006, and other academic staff governance committees.

After working a 40 percent schedule since January, Beck says he’s ready to embrace full-time retirement. He and his wife plan to spend their spring and summer remodeling their cabin in northern Wisconsin, then take a trip to Ireland in the fall with their two daughters.

Milner says she expects she and her colleagues will be reaching out to Beck in the coming weeks to ask for help answering questions that might crop up.

“I do actually think we’re going to end up needing to call him,” she says. “We’ve been trying to taper off our dependence on Bruce, but he’s still the only person who knows how to do some complicated things.”