As data-informed decision-making continues to evolve across multiple disciplines in higher education institutions, and as the role of research administration continues to expand from proposal submissions, compliance, and managing research and development expenditures to a profession with an active partnership with investigators to support…

Policy discussions related to higher education in sub-Saharan Africa often include concerns related to quality. Rather than being an abstract characteristic, quality of higher education is the result of a series of actions and practices, and yet there is limited research on the practices associated with quality in higher education in Africa. This…

The considerable institutional distance between home and host countries of most international branch campuses (IBCs) necessitates that they address the managerial challenge of balancing global integration and local responsiveness. Previous studies have investigated IBCs' strategies for addressing this challenge as well as the macro- or micro-level…

The primary goal of this study was to evaluate the literature on the function of higher education and extract significant insights using the VosViewer and Citespaces tools. The findings reveal that higher education is a substantial worry for scientists, particularly in 2015-2019. Furthermore, research indicates a significant body of knowledge on…

In this study, the effects of academic inbreeding on individual and institutional research productivity are examined to understand its impact as a recruitment policy. Over the past decade, in particular, there has been growing awareness of the problems posed by inbreeding in higher education. This study aims to expand on this awareness through an…

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…

Higher education is in a moment of pause, facing an opportunity to transform or continue to perpetuate the status quo. The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the recognition of racial violence, has created an opportunity for institutions to question their own policies and practices. The purpose of this inquiry is to question the science behind…

As improving equity becomes prioritized in higher education, Offices of Institutional Research (OIRs) find themselves in a central position to identify and address educational inequities faced by racially minoritized students. However, their potential to serve as a catalyst for organizational change has yet to be fulfilled. In this study, we…

The depths of the impact of COVID-19 on nearly every aspect of our personal and professional lives was becoming painfully clear in May and June of 2020. While institutions of higher education had implemented crisis/emergency plans in the immediate onset of the pandemic, and largely extended those efforts into summer terms, the fall 2020 term…

Given the importance of research communities and research mentoring activities in developing research skills, universities around the world have paid special attention to improving these two dimensions. However, developing research communities and research mentoring culture in Vietnamese universities largely remain at a nascent stage because these…

This article examines responses to a new impact indicator introduced to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF). While analysts have pointed to opportunities in impact policy for educational research as a field, the requirement to demonstrate impact beyond the academy poses challenges for research relating to higher education. The study…

This chapter synthesizes research on women in STEM undergraduate fields and aims to sharpen our empirical and theoretical frameworks for future higher education research. Institutional research implications are discussed here and throughout the volume.

Sustainability has become increasingly important to research and practice. In order to determine impacts, identify improvement potential and to disclose efforts towards sustainability, an organization needs appropriate reporting. Thus, sustainability reporting has become a topic of broader interest, for example, to assess own situations, enable…

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 concluding chapter reflects on the established and evolving body of transfer research and offers future directions for institutional research and higher education scholarship around transfer.