Academically Adrift. Or Not?

In the spring of 2011, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa released what some would consider a controversial book called Academically Adrift. As many in the ACCU community know, various media outlets referenced this study in order to report college and university students were not learning at an acceptable level, did not study enough, and were not meeting the expectations of employers. Soon afterward, I began receiving phone calls and emails from students and colleagues at my institution asking if the results applied to University of St. Thomas (UST) students. Fortunately, we began administering the CLA (2007) two years after the authors study cohort. This fortuitous timing placed us in a position to respond to our university community. In fact, the institution was in the midst of administering the final section of the longitudinal study at the same time the study was released.............

Putting the 'A' in IR&A

When I first arrived on my campus nearly four years ago, the focus of Institutional Research and Analysis (IR&A) was directed primarily on survey administration and the development of historical reports. Over time, we have maintained these responsibilities and added many more. For example, several years ago we assumed enrollment reporting from the University Registrar. In addition, we have taken on the mandatory federal reporting responsibilities of both the Registrar and Human Resources. We were also tasked with the responsibility of improving the institutional Data Factbook which is in its third iteration and currently includes 74 pages, 98 charts, and 76 tables describing the admissions, enrollment, academic, and human resource patterns at the institution. In addition, we have developed additional reports to include the Academic Department Factbook, Human Resources Factbook, Tommie Almanac, Survey Factbook, and many others. The number of surveys administered by this office has increased with many legacy surveys converted from the more expensive paper version to a more efficient and cost effective electronic version. In addition to....

Institutional Research and Planning

The field of Institutional Research (IR) is a growing, and dare I say a thriving field in the arena of higher education. Much of this growth can be attributed to the continued emphasis on meaningful institutional planning. Of course, meaningful planning requires higher education institutions to make informed decisions based on accurate, timely, and useful information. As such, higher education organizations that make data entry, storage, and reporting systems a priority are in a much better position to negotiate the current economic climate when compared to those institutions that have not emphasized these principles. Simply stated, data informed institutions will not only survive the current recession, but they will most likely become stronger when compared to their less informed peers and competitors. In the end, much credit for success or failure during these economic times rests with the highest levels of the administration at each institution. Only with their leadership, foresight, and most importantly, their authority will the effectiveness of modern information systems be maximized. I emphasize this point as I have learned first-hand...

Identifying Comparison Institutions

Higher education institutions are often concerned with how they compare to other higher education institutions. In the case of my institution, we have often compared ourselves to other Catholic institutions. The last comparison group was developed nearly ten years ago. Senior leadership has begun the discussion as to whether this is still the appropriate comparison group. In order to assist in this discussion, my office attempted to use an empirical method to determine a comparison group based on quantitative similarities.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) collects information on an annual basis from all Title IV higher education institutions. The collection effort is implemented during the academic year with the inclusion of information pertaining to enrollment, financial aid, finance, graduation, and human resources. Subsequently, the institutional identifiable data....

Quality Point Status

Accountability is a major concern for higher education officials in the US and beyond. There is increased pressure to retain and graduate students in order to satisfy key stakeholders such as board members and taxpayers. Students who fail academically comprise one population we can look to for improvement. This post will focus on a seldom-used measure to determine the status of undergraduate students who are in academic distress. The name of the measure is "quality point status." This measure is cited several times in higher eductaion literature as honor point deficiency (Schuster, 1971; Russell, 1982; Kinloch, Frost, & MacKay, 1993). For the purpose of this post, the measure has been renamed to reflect a negative, neutral, and positive nature. Negative quality point status reflects the number of quality points needed to restore the student’s grade point average to a 2.00. Prior to understanding quality point status, a brief description of the method for determining grade point average (GPA) is in order. A students GPA is determined by assigning a value to the letter grade earned in a course (e.g., A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, and F=0) and multiplying this value by the number of credits assigned to the course. This calculation determines the number of quality points awarded per course. Subsequently, the sum of the quality points....

Faculty Time Commitments

On occasion, I am asked to describe the typical faculty member’s workload at my institution. Although this may seem like a simple request, I know of very few academic units that track such a measure. I have always tried to explain the process by referring to the traditional view of scholarship which includes activities related to teaching, research, and service. Of course, one would expect much variability when comparing the amount of time an individual faculty member would spend on these three activities. Still, an IR professional may want to approximate this number for a variety of reasons to include collective bargaining, resource allocation, or course release policy development.

In my case, I took advantage of the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE) to approximate these time commitments at the institutional level. At our institution, approximately 400 full time faculty members were asked to complete the survey. Overall, 183 (47%) individuals responded to the survey. The area of the FSSE....