One hundred years have passed since the founding of the Bureau of Institutional Research at the University of Illinois. If the UI bureau and University of Minnesota bureau are the origins of institutional research, the California higher education system demonstrated its power and relevance to statewide planning.
While the political compromises and will behind the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California are irrefutable, the contributions from five years of continuous, statewide institutional research by the joint staff of the Liaison Committee cannot be discounted. The foundations for the 1960 Master Plan had been laid by the groundbreaking research of the 1955 restudy, the 1957 report on the need for additional centers, and subsequent statewide research on higher education in California. While the attention to enrollments, enrollment projections, student distributions, admissions eligibility, site capacities, and unit costs may seem unrefined or mundane, the scope of statewide institutional research constituted basic descriptive and causal factors for the study of higher education. The descriptive statistics common to the state studies formed the outward characteristics of institutions that suggest how each fit into a whole sector of higher education. The repeated analyses of enrollment projections based on demography, college-going propensity, and access belied a relatively simple concept of student demand for higher education as the major causal agency in higher education outcomes. Nonetheless, the inchoate paradigm for research on higher education opened up new possibilities for institutional research to transition from self-study to social science.
Moreover, as the methodologies of institutional research became more standardized by repeated multi-institutional studies, the importance of the assumptions for projections in effect became more apparent to the stakeholders in Californian higher education. The statewide studies made possible the politics and political compromises defined by Clark Kerr’s “five central issues” in the higher education system. In this regard, the 1960 Master Plan was as much the culmination of state-coordinated institutional research as it was the mastery of state politics on major policy questions confronting California higher education in the early 1960s.
To learn more about the power and significance of institutional research for the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, see my new history of the profession, Outsourcing Student Success, a history of institutional research and its significance for the future of higher education. Now available on Amazon.