John Hetts
Strategic Advisor, California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office (CCCCO)
John J. Hetts, Ph.D., is the Executive Vice Chancellor for the Office of Innovation, Data, Evidence, and Analytics for the California Community Colleges. Dr. Hetts is a nationally recognized leader in intersegmental educational pathways in higher education, having spent the last two decades working to better understand and recognize student capacity to make certain that all students receive fair credit for their skills and the full opportunity to put those skills to use to achieve their educational goals and aspirations. As Executive Vice Chancellor, Dr. Hetts is responsible to agency-wide strategy, initiatives, and policies for the design and delivery of the information technology and security, data infrastructure, architecture, and visualization, and research for the agency and the system, in support of student access, security, equity, and success.
In his previous role at the Chancellor’s Office as a Visiting Executive, Dr. Hetts provided system leadership for data, information, and research and was responsible for the design and deployment of data infrastructure, accountability and improvement metrics, data visualizations and dashboards, and internal and external research in support of the development and evaluation of policies and programs designed to improve student outcomes and advance the overall Vision for Success. He helped reimagine the role of data, research, and evidence, working to rebuild that capacity within the system office to better support both the work of the system office as well as the system as a whole. He currently serves as a Board Member of the Governing Board of the State of California Cradle to Career System, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), and the Program Pathways Mapper Advisory Board.
Prior to joining the Chancellor’s Office, Dr. Hetts served as the Senior Director of Data Science for Educational Results Partnership which, under the leadership of the Chancellor’s Office, manages CalPASS Plus, California’s voluntary intersegmental data system, and the LaunchBoard, the improvement and accountability dashboards for the California Community Colleges, including the Student Success Metrics which help assess our progress on the Vision for Success. Before that, he served as the Director of Institutional Research at Long Beach City College during its implementation of multiple measures-based assessment where his collaborations on modeling student assessment and placement won multiple statewide research awards.
Dr. Hetts earned a B.A. with Distinction and Honors from Stanford University followed by a doctorate in Social Psychology with specializations in Measurement and Psychometrics as well as Political Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.