The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on the field of institutional research at a crossroads on August 31, 2017: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Ed-s-Data-Experts/241079.
In this article, the Chronicle reprints a narrative created by the AIR leadership to advance what it calls its “new vision.” Unfortunately, in support of this narrative, the association, the article, and the people it cites repeatedly disparage the everyday practitioners in institutional research and the dues-paying members of the AIR. As the story unfolds, the reader learns that institutional researchers are “[un]able to talk through what numbers do and don’t mean,” “unaccustomed to using the data to tell a story or to suggesting solutions to problems that numbers reveal,” “ill-equipped to…make sense of…data and tell us what we need to do to change,” and “off in the corner somewhere.” At the same time, the article intimates that, through job descriptions and recruitment processes, the typical institutional researcher does not have “an outgoing personality, superb communication skills, or the ability to build relationships across campus.” There is no substantive evidence for these statements about institutional researchers as practitioners directly, they are stated to support a narrative that distracts from the responsibilities of the AIR leadership over the past fifty years.
The profession does have many challenges today, but they are not primarily the perceived limitations of the individuals as characterized by this article. The 2014 study by the National Association of System Heads (NASH) faulted the unequal capacities of institutional research offices within a single state system as well as the “stove-piping” of institutional research throughout an institution. Non-centralized institutional research functions constrained the offices to the reporting of student statistics and distributed “other topical areas to…the budget and human resource officers.” The distribution of institutional research functions throughout the institutions in a single system further led to both redundancy and undermined comparisons on basic institutional statistics: “While gaps exist in data governance and infrastructure among systems and their campuses, there is also a redundancy in reporting between system and campus, perhaps necessitated by different audiences for the different levels of work. This contributes to confusion about basic measures and metrics, and also gets in the way of potential efforts for greater sharing of work between campuses and systems in order to free up staff to do other things.” These are not assertions about the personal capabilities of institutional researchers, but the “elaborate profusion” or “federated networks” of institutional research functions outside of our offices–decentralized functions that the AIR has advocated for nearly fifty years.
The AIR leadership has regarded the work of institutional researchers as a function, as opposed to a profession, ever since Joe L. Saupe and James B. Montgomery wrote its first white paper in 1970. I tried to get the Chronicle to correct its misrepresentation of the AIR’s “new vision” of institutional research as a function, but it refuses to correct its article. The current condition of institutional research offices in the nation’s public systems of higher education, per NASH, are arguably the direct outcome of a field defined as a function rather than a profession, ill-prepared by higher education doctoral programs, inextricably beholden to a single institution, and most effectively performed by “any component” of the university (Saupe and Montgomery, 1970). In addition, IUPUI is hardly an example to the rest of the profession (see below). The description of the simple descriptive statistical research performed at IUPUI since 2015 is, I would say, routine at the colleges and universities most of us have supported during our careers. The description of IUPUI’s efforts has little to do with the advanced analytical capabilities of data science or the connections between resource use and student success. Instead, the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that institutional researchers are incapable or unwilling to follow the simple solutions only recently discovered at IUPUI, a disservice to the institutional research profession and higher education executives in general.
How does it help institutional researchers to advance student success at institutions of higher education when the AIR and its former leadership imply to their campus colleagues that most are “unaccustomed to using the data to tell a story or to suggesting solutions to problems that numbers reveal”? In short, why is it okay for the AIR and its former leadership to disparage the general membership of the association in this way?
I hope others will write the editors of the Chronicle of Higher Education at letters@chronicle.com to explain how their careless description of institutional researchers in general complicates the ability of the dedicated persons, competently engaged in the profession, to build relationships and to lead initiatives for student success on campuses.