Data-driven is an important thinking concept, technical resource and innovative method in the new era, which expands the way people think about, explain and deal with problems. Starting from reality, this paper adopts data-driven theory to provide technical support and scientific cognitive way for ideological and political education in new era colleges and universities, and explores data-driven optimization strategy for ideological and political education in colleges and universities. With the support of big data technology, data-driven ideological and political education in the new era explores the trajectory and laws of ideological and political education thoughts and behaviors, changes from attaching importance to result orientation to attaching importance to data prediction function, and changes from focusing on theoretical thinking to in-depth practice, which opens up a brand new idea for the research of ideological and political education in the new era.