MEASURING WHAT MATTERS: A COMPOSITE YOUTH-ENGAGEMENT INDEX AND DATA-DRIVEN MONITORING ARCHITECTURE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

Universities cannot govern student engagement they cannot see. In many rapidly expanding systems, including Uzbekistan’s, the management of youth work generates abundant activity but little comparable evidence: participation is counted, satisfaction is occasionally surveyed, yet no single, decomposable measure captures how engaged students actually are. Purpose. This article designs a composite Youth-Engagement Index (YEI) for higher education and embeds it in a practical monitoring architecture, so that engagement becomes a governable quantity rather than an anecdote. Methods. Following the OECD/JRC methodology for constructing composite indicators, the study defines a five-dimensional model of engagement — academic, co-curricular, civic-social, psychological and digital — selects observable sub-indicators for each, and specifies normalization, theory-led weighting, aggregation and robustness testing. The approach is illustrated with data patterns from three higher education institutions in Tashkent. Results. The YEI renders engagement comparable across faculties and cohorts while remaining decomposable into its dimensions, exposing profiles that a single total would conceal; it is paired with an early-warning workflow and a data-governance layer. A comparison with conventional activity counts and one-off surveys shows what a theory-grounded composite adds. Conclusions. A composite index is not a bureaucratic scoreboard but the sensory apparatus of engagement governance: it turns scattered digital traces into insight, insight into intervention, and intervention back into measurement. The instrument is transferable to comparable systems and offers a concrete route from monitoring rhetoric to evidence-based practice.