In June 2019, Minnesota State set a critical goal: By 2030, eliminate the educational equity gaps at each of the 30 colleges and 7 universities that comprise the system. To achieve the goal of Equity 2030, and empower actors at every level of Minnesota State, system and campus leaders need to fully embrace data democratization. Without access to…

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…

The increasing volume of information and the intense pace of its circulation are changing the ways universities access, use, analyze, and provide data. Many have championed the use of large-scale databases to track student admissions and retention, faculty productivity, student wellness, and other phenomena that shape our understandings of higher…

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…

In this chapter, we review the strengths of NCES survey data, provide an example of analyzing NCES survey data to explore the pathways between coursework in career and technical education in high school and postsecondary success, and offer suggestions for future data collection.

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…

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.

As institutions of higher education increasingly look to data as evidence to support planning, allocate resources, and inform teaching and pedagogy, ethical considerations regarding learning analytics have evolved from being on the margins to more central in the conversations surrounding institutional uses of student data. After outlining this…

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.

The federal government has collected data from colleges and universities for more than a century. However, how and what data are collected has evolved over time, as has the purposes for collecting those data. The most systematic collection of data happens through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is required to be…

We discuss methods that can improve response rates in large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Regardless of the specific study topic, sample member population, or method of contact, data collections should be designed with certain core principles in mind: legitimizing the study to prospective participants; presenting study…

The resources needed to conduct high-quality and large-scale survey research are often beyond the reach of institutional researchers and higher education analysts. However, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) provides many national student surveys that researchers can utilize. We outline four NCES studies--the High School…

This chapter provides examples of innovative methods and tools to collect, analyze, and report both quantitative and qualitative data in student affairs assessment.