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…

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…

For decades, colleges and universities have strived to use data to take bold actions and make big decisions. The result is an expanding community of higher education professionals who are leveraging analytics to deliver optimal learning experiences for students. This chapter will describe the evolution of data use in higher education with a focus…

The expansion of big data and analytics has led to the diffusion of institutional research functions across campus departments. In this new environment, IR professionals expect to lead and coordinate various institutional analyses. This article presents a four-quadrant framework to facilitate the dynamics between data analysis and decision-making.

We provide an overview of existing and emerging ways that institutional researchers can leverage National Student Clearinghouse data to expand a culture of data-driven decision-making across campus, with a focus on examples from the field.

Data analytics is increasingly important to the operations and strategic growth of higher education institutions. In September 2019, three higher education professional associations issued a rare joint statement calling for the accelerated investment and intensified efforts to develop and deploy data analytics in support of campus decision making.…

As institutions seek to shift into more advanced analytics and data-based decision-support, many institutional research offices face the challenge of meeting the office's current demands while taking on more intricate and specialized work to support decision-making. Given the great need organizations have for information that supports real-time…

This chapter addresses how IR/IE both responds to and leads in our institutions and across higher education in measuring and improving student success. We introduce a new student success measurement framework in the context of internal and external facing needs, we define the importance of actionable information to inform decision-making, and we…

Decades of research suggest that faculty play a critical role in student learning and success, yet at many institutions, faculty are not integrated into the institutional research function. This chapter examines how institutional research and faculty can collaborate to encourage data-informed faculty decision-making to drive student success and…

Evidence-based decision-making requires access to good and reliable data. In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase of data available to institutions, from internal as well as external sources. With this increase in data and its analytics, new challenges and questions arise. One of the most pertinent of which is the ethics and best…

Human resources (HR) represent the most significant investment on most of our college campuses in terms of time and financial resources. The importance of good data about the workforce begins with establishing a need for a new position. That need for data continues with recruiting, hiring, training, promoting, retaining (or not), and retiring…

This chapter utilizes the duties and functions of institutional research to outline the skills needed by institutional research professionals in an evolving digital institution. The concept of future-proofing, explained and considered in this context, encourages professionals to develop skills for the present with the future needs of data-informed…

One of the most critical functions on campus is enrollment management. As budgets become tighter and institutions rely more heavily on tuition, the competition to "make the class" intensifies. How can institutional research help inform strategic planning in such a market? This paper will discuss the way that institutional researchers can…