Before communicating any information, institutional researchers should answer four diagnostic questions: Who's asking? What for? What's the proper medium? What happens next? (MSE)

Successful outcomes assessment programs have many common characteristics. Institutional researchers should examine these signs of success and use them as guides for developing their own campus programs. (Author/MSE)

Enrollment management attempts to coordinate and monitor the programs and policies that influence college enrollment. A model is proposed that is designed to guide a comprehensive research framework that will inform enrollment management decisionmaking by including both student recruitment and retention as contributors to a common database. The…

Approaches to college student monitoring have been shaped by changing contexts and evolving technical capabilities, beginning with retention studies and developing into fully relational databases for cohort tracking. Institutional researchers should know this history and be aware of the specific demands for information that future tracking systems…