Black data: higher education, datafication, and the Black student body

The fullness of Black students' experiences in college has yet to be archived. The same can be said of Black people broadly, whose existence has long been reduced by and to what is observable, by systems of power and those at the helm. This is perhaps due to the structural and structural limitations of data collection efforts, or not of interest to decision-makers. Or perhaps, this is a symbol of the impossibility of capturing Black life beyond the physical. Regardless, Black life on college campuses across the globe is systematically reduced to standard institutional measures. This reduction is facilitated by the ongoing datafication of student success-the ways that students' success has been made metric and the ways student success as a socio-political phenomenon has been increasingly governed by data-related practices and discourses. As a result, Black students' material and data realities are (re)constructed, especially through student success data practices.