This chapter focuses on perspectives of external data reporting and their implications for institutional research offices and campuses as a whole. The authors examine a variety of uses for externally reported data and explore opportunities for using these data more fully across the institution.

This chapter describes the background and process for collecting postgraduation outcomes data at a 4-year not-for-profit private college. The strategies, analyses, and reporting of this data-collection effort are highlighted with the use of a case study.

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

This chapter describes how canonical correlation was used in conjunction with an item response theory model to address the relationship between college students' civic engagement involvement and attitudes as undergraduates. The constructs of interest were students' participation in civic, political, and expressive activities, as well as…

This final chapter provides observations about institutional research in community colleges derived from the preceding chapters and the issue editors' own experiences. Taken as a whole, the chapters in this issue, as well as the editors' experiences, suggest several observations about institutional research in community colleges. These include the…

While individuals in each country or part of the world face unique issues, many challenges facing higher education today are similar across the world. The great majority of higher education systems have grown in recent decades, enrolling far more students than they did in prior years and expanding their activities into new spheres such as economic…

Surveys and benchmarks continue to grow in importance for community colleges in response to several factors. One is the press for accountability, that is, for colleges to report the outcomes of their programs and services to demonstrate their quality and prudent use of resources, primarily to external constituents and governing boards at the state…

In 1933-1934, a few years before the landmark study on student achievement by Learned and Wood (1938), the total enrollment of students in colleges, universities, junior colleges, teachers colleges, and normal schools was around 1.06 million out of a U.S. population of about 126.5 million, or about 0.8 percent. In 2008, the total projected fall…

Accountability pressures in higher education are not new; they are part of an enduring public policy discourse about the costs and benefits, both individual and social, of higher education. What is relatively new, however, is the prominent place that issues of accountability now occupy on the nation's higher education agenda. There is an important…

This chapter describes the system office for community college institutional research for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. What makes this System Offices for Community College Institutional Research (SOCCIR) somewhat different from the others reviewed in this volume is that the Minnesota system IR office has responsibilities for both…

This chapter describes the system office for community college institutional research (SOCCIR) for the State of Florida. The Division of Florida Colleges has a long history of providing reports that contain information on issues of interest to both the individual members of the system and the public. Fact books have been produced by the office for…

Like other public sector institutions, higher education has become part of the accountability movement. Colleges and universities increasingly rely on institutional research offices to document performance by providing data to external audiences. In fact, most of the funding available to colleges and universities today comes with some kind of…

Assessment of general education has a long history, although relative to the age of liberal education and educational evaluation it is a very recent development. One of the first recorded efforts to comprehensively assess student achievement in higher education in the United States occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when many institutions…

In Texas, the accountability movement was initiated by Governor Rick Perry, who issued an executive order in 2004 requiring all public institutions of higher education to work with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to create a comprehensive system of accountability. Its purpose was one of public accountability: to the citizens of…

There is almost nothing more frustrating to an institutional researcher than seeing university leaders ignore data. The case study in this article examines how an institutional research office was able to put data to work in enrollment services and produce record-setting numbers of applications, admissions, and confirmations within a nine-month…