Assessment information should be actionable in that findings must be used to improve the student experience and educational effectiveness. Assessment is a worthwhile undertaking when campuses generate meaningful data, thoroughly consider and discuss evidence-based improvement initiatives, and ultimately use results to improve educational…

As an enterprise that relies heavily on state funding, public higher education has long seen its support rise and fall with the boom-and-bust cycle of the economy. This chapter examines how the University System of Maryland repositioned itself as a state system able to thrive in an era of permanently diminished resources and perpetually escalating…

This document presents a creatively written description of Antioch College in Columbia, Maryland, written by a college consultant who was hired as a consultant to the governing council of the college to make an analysis of the college's governance system and the learning and social environment of the school. The author describes how the…

This journal chronicles a sample of the papers and presentations delivered during previous annual meetings of the Maryland Association for Institutional Research on the fifth anniversary of that association. A first paper, one from the first annual meeting in 1987 titled "Environmental Scanning: Assessing Local Business Training Needs"…

A statewide system of reporting faculty workload for the 18 Maryland state community colleges is described, and study findings on faculty workload are presented. Data are collected for full-time teaching faculty who are tenured or on continuous contract. Major findings include: 89 percent of faculty workload is spent in formal classroom…

This volume offers nine papers on higher education research in Maryland all of which were presented at annual meetings from 1990 through 1993. The following papers are included: (1) "The Geo-Demographic Approach to Student Recruitment: The PG-TRAK90" Lifestyle Cluster System" (Karl Boughan); (2) "Evaluating College Services: A…

Information on the use and effectiveness of follow-up surveys in four-year and two-year institutions are obtained. In the four-year sector, 55 public and 34 private colleges were included, while in the two-year sector, the entire public systems of four states were compared. This involved 15 institutions in Georgia, 17 in Maryland, 16 in South…

This volume presents five papers on higher education institutional research in Maryland, all of which were originally presented at annual meetings of the Maryland Association for Institutional Research from 1993 through 1995. The first paper is "A Day in the Life of an Institutional Researcher: Past, Present and Future" (Merill…

The goals and aspirations of 35,950 students who had attended Maryland community colleges were surveyed 18 months after college entry. For first-time credit students who entered college during fall 1982, comparisons were made of two groups who returned usable responses to mailed questionnaires. The first group consisted of 5,133 students who were…

This volume presents papers from a 1988 conference on collegiate student financial aid which focused on trends in the cost of higher education, student loan defaults, trends in borrowing, the impact of congressional legislation, and state-level financial aid research. The papers are grouped in five sections corresponding to the five topics, and…

The NEAIR 2006 Conference Proceedings is a compilation of papers presented at the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania conference. Topics include: Policy Analysis, Grading Policy, State Higher Education Accountability Program, Performance Assessment, Freshmen Transfer Risk, Assessment, Degree Completion, First-Year Academic Success, Effectiveness in…

This publication contains 25 papers from a conference on defining quality higher education. Opening sections cover the conference program and members of the conference's steering committee. A representative sampling of papers includes the following: "The College Student Experiences Questionnaire: A Follow-Up Study of Academic and Social…