Author: Robin Huntington Shores

Anyone who is not yet convinced about the importance of a strong institutional research office in supporting planning, assessment, and decision-making at colleges and universities today needs only to read Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s 2016 opinion in the Fisher case on race-conscious admissions to understand:

“The University now has at its disposal valuable data about the manner in which different approaches to admissions may foster diversity or instead dilute it. The University must continue to use this data to scrutinize the fairness of its admissions program; to assess whether changing demographics have undermined the need for a race-conscious policy; and to identify the effects, both positive and negative, of the affirmative-action measures it deems necessary.”

Our profession has evolved over the past 50 years, from a handful of data wonks focused primarily on responding to external agencies’ fledgling efforts to understand the increasingly complex higher education landscape, to internally focused analytic teams, indispensable to institutional decision-making.

An effective IR office uses its data infrastructure to provide basic institutional information to internal and external audiences, and then builds on that essential foundation, leveraging its expertise and perspective to provide meaningful research and analytics that illuminates what is and isn’t working, the results of new initiatives to support students, general educational outcomes, and future directions that may be promising.  To fully support its institution the IR office must go beyond providing reports on topics that faculty and managers are interested in hearing about, and educate about what they ought to know – whether or not it is what they want to hear.  This is essential for evidence-based decision-making, differentiating effective institution from the rest.

Many offices at the College receive requests for information from agencies, researchers, peer institutions, and others, and it can be difficult to judge which are worthwhile and which are not. A department chair recently asked me about how to decide which requests require a response. Continue reading IR Triage

The fall has been whizzing by, and here it is Halloween already.   I shouldn’t be surprised, it’s been busier than ever.   (I know. I say that every year.)   We’ve completed two massive projects involving tracking student enrollment and outcomes over multiple cohorts and years, and another one that was small potatoes after those.  The Associate Provost and I have spent a ton of time building on the considerable work of our Middle States Periodic Review Report (PRR) Steering Committee to create a first draft of the report.     Our new IR staff members and I have worked together to get up to speed (including the Fall freeze and fall IPEDS reporting).    We’ve fielded four five! surveys (so far), and are getting pretty darned good at Qualtrics.   (Nothing like troubleshooting to help you learn something.)  I’ve gone through the CITI training for IRB and feel incredibly ethical.    And of course we’ve dealt with all the usual ad hoc requests and miscellany.  But with some of this big stuff behind us, and what is turning out to be a terrific IR team, it’s like the sun coming out.  For the first time in a year it seems we’re almost caught up.  We freeze employee data tomorrow, so that may not last long.