Building a culture of data governance at a higher education institution involves collaboration across the entire institution. Before the creation of formalized roles to perform data management and data governance functions at colleges and universities, these functions were performed by traditional institutional research personnel. Documentation…

As institutions seek to shift into more advanced analytics and data-based decision-support, many institutional research offices face the challenge of meeting the office's current demands while taking on more intricate and specialized work to support decision-making. Given the great need organizations have for information that supports real-time…

As federal guidelines have increased reporting demands on all sectors of education (United States Department of Education [USDOE], 2015) and state reporting requirements have expanded as legislatures call for performance-based funding (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2015), the need for institutional research offices has become the norm…

Data continues to grow in both importance and quantity within colleges and universities. IR professionals need to know ways data can create potential legal issues in order to be proactive rather than reactive to these situations.

As tuition rates for higher education rise, universities are under increased pressure from internal and external stakeholders to document outcomes such as graduation rates. To do so, higher education institutions must use data effectively. This paper examines the University of Wisconsin--Stout's (UW-Stout) strategies for data use in the…

Human resources (HR) represent the most significant investment on most of our college campuses in terms of time and financial resources. The importance of good data about the workforce begins with establishing a need for a new position. That need for data continues with recruiting, hiring, training, promoting, retaining (or not), and retiring…

In institutional research, modern data mining approaches are seldom considered to address predictive analytics problems. The goal of this paper is to highlight the advantages of tree-based machine learning algorithms over classic (logistic) regression methods for data-informed decision making in higher education problems, and stress the success of…

This chapter utilizes the duties and functions of institutional research to outline the skills needed by institutional research professionals in an evolving digital institution. The concept of future-proofing, explained and considered in this context, encourages professionals to develop skills for the present with the future needs of data-informed…

This chapter discusses principles that support using data about teaching and learning and offers several strategies particularly well suited for use by institutional researchers at small colleges in helping faculty, staff, and administrators use data on student learning for improvement.

Data quality has become a pressing issue for many campuses in recent years, as colleges struggle to extract timely, accurate, and consistent information from ever-proliferating institutional data sources in order to meet strategic decision-making and accountability demands. In this mixed methods study, a survey and semi-structured interviews were…

Strong relationships with senior administrators, effective cross-campus collaboration, and efficient use of technology are central to impactful IR in small colleges.

To whom should higher education institutions provide data, and what is the impact of transparency on institutions?

This chapter describes how data analysis and data-driven decision making were critical for designing, developing, and assessing a new academic program. The authors--one, the program's founder; the other, an alumna--begin by highlighting some of the elements in the program's incubation and, subsequently, describe some of the components for data…

Data governance is a relatively new and evolving discipline. It encompasses the people who are responsible for data quality (the stewards); the policies and processes associated with collecting, managing, storing and reporting data; and the information technology systems and support that provide efficient infrastructure. Higher education…

This study examined three institutional researchers from three different Hispanic-serving community colleges in southern California to examine how they would use data to act as agents of organizational learning and raise awareness of Hispanic students' educational outcomes within their respective institutions. This study was of a qualitative…