Wichita State University (WSU) began the SEM process in 2015 with a steering committee co-chaired by the university registrar and the chief data officer (CDO). Work leading up to and undertaken throughout that process and the implementation of the SEM plan it produced helped to form an extraordinary partnership between these two professionals.…

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…

This chapter provides an example of how one university's institutional research office played an active role in using data from institutional studies to guide the university toward courses ripe for change, faculty toward successful teaching strategies, students toward successful learning behaviors, and the university toward assessing the impact of…

Higher education institutions in the United States have collected and analyzed data for decades. From mandatory reporting for state and federal compliance to ad hoc reporting for internal and external stakeholders, there are myriad business purposes for which administrators, staff, and faculty routinely gather data. As more colleges and…

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…

Guided by the missions and visions, higher education institutions utilize benchmarking processes to identify better and more efficient ways to carry out their operations. Aside from the initial planning and organization steps involved in benchmarking, a matching or selection step is crucial for identifying other institutions that have good…

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…

Institutional researchers might know more about non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty than leaders on many college campuses, particularly four-year institutions and research universities (Cross and Goldenberg, 2009). As such, institutional researchers play an important role in educating campus leaders about this growing segment of the academic workforce.…

This discussion constructs a survey data quality strategy for institutional researchers in higher education in light of total survey error theory. It starts with describing the characteristics of institutional research and identifying the gaps in literature regarding survey data quality issues in institutional research and then introduces the…

Following Dr. Edward Hitchcock's lead at Amherst College in 1861, soon other institutions of higher education established physical education departments that evolved into independent college health programs. As the field of college health expanded, leaders from numerous campuses began meeting to share information and discuss formation of a…

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…

Data mining provides both systematic and systemic ways to detect patterns of student engagement among students at hundreds of institutions. Using traditional statistical techniques alone, the task would be significantly difficult--if not impossible--considering the size and complexity in both data and analytical approaches necessary for this…

Institutional researchers are responsible for the collection, organization, analysis, and maintenance of large amounts of personally identifiable data on students, faculty, and staff. Not only are institutional research (IR) offices required to report these data to state and federal agencies, they are also responsible for providing information to…

As students are asked to share more of the costs of a post-secondary education, the quality of their overall educational experience and perceived return on investment (ROI) are increasingly important. For prospective students and their parents, what they are told they can expect from the student experience at an institution often makes the most…

In this article, the author argues that current strategies to study and understand students' identities fall short of fully capturing their complexity. A multi-dimensional perspective and a mixed-methods approach can reveal nuance that is missed with current approaches. The author offers an illustration of how mixed-methods research can promote a…