Institutional Research: The Key to Success
The administration of higher education institutions is becoming an increasingly complex task. The integration and advancement of areas such as academic affairs, student affairs, physical plant, development, public relations, outreach, and continuing education require administrators to have reliable and timely data about past and present activities to move forward with an agenda focused on excellence and growth towards the future. The function of institutional research does precisely that: it informs the decision-making process and keeps track of our strategic actions. It provides the data needed to support our traditional teaching, research, and community engagement mission and it is also recognized as a vital contributing factor to our excellence.
As old challenges are resolved, new ones appear. Higher education institutions are being required to be more accountable of all academic and cocurricular activities by most accrediting agencies and governments at the local, state, and federal level. Post-secondary institutions must provide evidence that they have an effective and comprehensive assessment process in place, so data obtained is used to clarify further actions in order to improve the overall quality of all academic programs and activities.
In addition, higher education increasingly operates in a global context. Future graduates will have to be global citizens and that requires internationalization of the curriculum. Community engagement is also becoming a measure of success of higher education institutions. Internationalization of the curriculum and community engagement endeavors are subjected to the assessment and quality improvement cycle. Data gathering and analysis, forecasting, and the preparation of scenarios to determine a course of action is a must for successful administration in all these areas. The rule is that every action should be measurable so that outcomes can be easily evaluated and the evaluations used to improve future operations.
Penn State Berks has the ability to obtain information from The Pennsylvania State University Data Warehouse. Several times a day, our Senior Director of Planning, Research, and Assessment (PRA), Dr. Mary Lou D’Allegro, and her staff download data, aggregate this information, and prepare reports or offer interpretation of the information gleaned from the Data Warehouse. For the most part, the information is used to provide updates to the status of strategic plan initiatives, answer critical enrollment management questions, or support the assessment of an academic program or evaluation of a campus operation. In addition, information from the Data Warehouse can afford faculty and staff further research and inquiry opportunities. If the data cannot be found on the Data Warehouse, D’Allegro and her staff will design an instrument or survey to generate reliable, valid, and accurate data to encourage assessment, address a critical issue, or inform decision making. Often, the PRA Office will also provide guidance in the methodology to administer these instruments and provide suggestions on the best way to aggregate the information collected from this research.
This practice of using data and conducting institutional research is repeatedly emulated across the University, often with an office dedicated to such endeavors. That is how we attain data about almost everything that goes on in our school. At the very least, we have key data to help inform our critical processes. The generation of high quality, reliable, and timely data is a continuous process. Moreover, the ability of a college to use this data to continually improve is the definitive measure of the success of institutional research.
Paul D. Esqueda, Ph.D.
Professor of Engineering and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Penn State Berks