Institutional Research associations across the world are re-imagining and redesigning their professional development and capacity building activities. This paper outlines the professional development activities of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) in the United States (est. 1966), the European Association for Institutional Research…

Efforts to develop common higher education data standards are expanding both within and across countries. The institutional research (IR) community plays a critical role in assuring that these efforts capture the diverse manifestations of the postsecondary and tertiary education systems and promote responsible comparisons. This chapter provides…

Twenty years ago, Pescosolido and Milkie (1995) reported that 50 percent of U.S. and Canadian sociology graduate programs offered formal teacher training. Despite pronouncements that offerings have increased substantially, no similarly thorough and direct investigation has been published since. In this time of dramatic change and increasing…

Over the past two decades, public higher education has become widely recognized for its contribution to socio-economic adjustment. This paper probes its evolution in two large and affluent democracies, the United States and Germany, whose higher education systems represent distinct ideal types. The analysis argues that public authorities in both…

There is a steady line of research to understand faculty diversity and its impact on the work life quality of faculty and learning outcomes of students in the U.S. higher education systems. What makes this volume unique is that, rather than treating diversity as a static and simplistic concept, the chapter authors presented information to show…

This AACRAO "60 Second Survey" asked respondents to identify the size, composition, name and level of decentralization for the Office of the Registrar. There were 1,389 unique institutional responses that represented 21 countries, commonwealths or territories, all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and 9 Canadian…

When colleges look to compare themselves with others, they are not much different from high-school students chasing popularity: Everyone wants to be friends with the Ivy League, but the Ivy League is really picky about whom it hangs out with. Each year colleges submit "comparison groups" to the U.S. Department of Education to get…

Institutional research in UK higher education is rarely consolidated into a central office function. This is in marked comparison to the position of IR in the USA where most universities accord it a high status which is absent from the UK context. The collection, analysis and interpretation of data in the USA appears, on the whole, more systematic…

This dissertation explores the nature, applicability and usefulness of social contract theory, and the resulting compact between higher education and society as a way to understand the growth and development of higher education in the United States. The goal is accomplished with an in-depth look at two different universities in the state of…

The U.S. federal government identifies many science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors as "areas of national need" that are "crucial to national innovation, competitiveness, and well-being and in which not enough students complete degrees." Underrepresentation of women in STEM in the United States has economic…

This study provides a multilens examination of the diversity of full-time faculty in the United States across 11 institutional types derived from Carnegie classifications, by the intersection of race/ethnicity, citizenship, and gender and to make comparisons across time. Whereas few other studies have assessed faculty diversity for the for-profit…

The system office for community college institutional research (SOCCIR) plays a role in the drama of higher education that states must orchestrate to help community college systems operate effectively and efficiently over the long term. But how exactly does the SOCCIR enable a state to accomplish what the separate institutional research (IR)…

In the past 20 years, the number of international faculty members at American universities has continued to increase rapidly. This growth is evident in data showing that the proportional representation of foreign-born faculty easily surpasses that of domestic underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. The increasing presence of international faculty…

In this paper we review recent increases in tuition at public institutions and estimate impacts on enrollment. We use data on all U.S. public 4-year colleges and universities from 1991 to 2006 and illustrate that tuition increased dramatically beginning in the early part of this decade. We examine impacts of such increases on total enrollment and…

The varied roles and scope of the field of institutional research (IR) make any overview of this administrative function difficult. In the USA, colleges and universities may have a large, well-defined administrative unit performing data tasks to support decision-making, or they may have only a part-time individual who coordinates basic reporting…