A  department chair at my university emailed me last October: "Can you  build me a dashboard that shows enrollment trends by program?" I said  sure. I asked three follow-up questions. By the fourth question, we had a  completely different project. She did not want enrollment trends. She wanted  to know which programs to cut before the provost asked. The dashboard was a  shield. The question behind the question was: help me make a decision I am  afraid to make, and give me something to point to when someone challenges it.  I have fielded roughly 1,200 data requests across 10 departments in the past  three years. Financial aid, facilities, registrar, enrollment, advancement.  People whose entire careers are built on institutional knowledge, not data  literacy. The pattern is always the same: they ask for a thing (a report, a  dashboard, a number), and the thing they ask for is almost never the thing  they need. We teach SQL. We teach Tableau. We teach Python. Nobody teaches  the 10-minute conversation that decides whether the next 40 hours of analyst  work produces something useful or something that gets opened twice and never  again.