Information Technology (IT) and Institutional Research (IR) units working together with planning, a focus on collaboration, and a willingness to create partnerships can help accelerate their institution's efforts to improve the data landscape. This chapter includes an overview of the challenges facing these two functional areas, the benefits of a…

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…

Institutional research/effectiveness offices are instrumental in advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) efforts. Ideally they have the knowledge, perspective, and network within an institution to impact practice, process, policy, and planning in order to guide the institution toward a goal of being fully inclusive. With an…

Institutions have many unique cultures and organizational structures that can strengthen or inhibit the planning and implementation of initiatives to enhance data-informed decision-making, build supporting infrastructure, and align the necessary human resources. This chapter discusses different strategies for aligning resources and organizing…

Colleges have access to more data than ever before, and to unlock its full potential, the right culture, processes, and technologies are needed. Given the pressures now facing campuses, the demand for evidence-based approaches to strategy have intensified. As a result, more attention has been placed on the importance of the relationship between…

Despite widespread agreement that privacy in the context of education is important, it can be difficult to pin down precisely "why" and "to what extent" it is important, and it is challenging to determine how privacy is related to other important values. This chapter seeks to better understand the concept of privacy in…

This chapter begins with an overview of the history of the Association for Institutional Research's use of ethical guidelines. The Association reworked these principles during 2019, the next chapter discusses the rationale and process for this rework. Next, AIR's new Statement of Ethical Principles is presented and discussed, and finally the…

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…

This article outlines the impacts of COVID-19 on higher education and provides a contextual assessment of how higher education systems can provide support to institutions and stakeholders through a formulated planning process which helps identify, plan, and achieve strategic goals in response to fluctuating priorities.

In this chapter, we walk the reader through a set of scenarios that administrators might face when using different types of data on campus. We also provide guiding questions to help institutional research professionals explore how to think about these scenarios with ethics in mind.

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…

This article describes how a large Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRDS) office engaged in efforts to promote culturally responsive and inclusive institutional research (IR) practices that take into account the increasingly diverse student, faculty, and staff populations we serve. We describe how we developed a diversity, equity and…

Institutional researchers can be confronted with ethical quandaries. Pressures from their institutions can conflict with professional standards and general ethical requirements. Analyses that appear to be neutral can conceal hidden assumptions that are unintentionally harmful to those individuals whom institutions have a responsibility to protect.…

Ethical issues are structurally present in the design and choice of data; the interaction between problem, model, and intervention; and the scientism that supports data analytics' claims to authority. In this chapter, I argue against three social assumptions behind common implementations of learning analytics: data realism, technological…

A successful IR leader in the digital institution requires effective communication skills to articulate institutional goals, as well as to collaborate with multiple groups for the design and management of operational tasks. This chapter examines the needed skills of senior IR professionals and how these skills apply within a digital institution.