The first institutional researchers took many of the necessary steps to establish standards for a community to study higher education “just as scientific investigation in the natural or social sciences.” Today, however, significant associations like the National Association of System Heads (NASH) and the American Council on Education (ACE) do not regard centralized offices of institutional research as capable of scaling up capacities in order to conduct studies on “the cross-cutting issues of the day” (NASH) or provide data science solutions without the need for external vendors (ACE). What happened to the promise of centralized offices of institutional research after 1964?
The Association for Institutional Research formed in 1965 with 382 charter members, seemingly as fulfillment of the promise of institutional research in higher education over the prior forty years. Initially, the direction of the association and the possibilities of the profession were open questions to its members, but the skeptics of institutional research and critics of the scientific study of higher education soon established control of the new association. The keynote address at the first annual forum organized by the Association for Institutional Research in 1966 asserted that field had “produced little of lasting significance” in its early years. As a follow-up in 1970, two former presidents of the association wrote what ostensibly is the first white paper by the AIR on the subject of centralized offices of institutional research. Rather than enumerate the success of the first centralized administrative offices following advances at the University of Illinois, the two former presidents claimed to correct the expectations of those with less familiarity for the profession:
The critics seem to confuse institutional research, as we view it, with the more basic research on higher education carried out in the centers for the study of higher education and by scholars in higher education and related subject fields. Certainly the more fundamental research is essential and practicing institutional researchers would be proud to have the general researchers included with them in a broader category of those committed to institutional research. But institutional research is specific and applied and the other is general and theoretical, institutional research should not be expected to produce knowledge of pervasive and lasting significance, though on occasion it may.
In addition, whereas the ACE had advocated for centralization of the offices only ten years earlier, the AIR’s former presidents demurred on the question of how a college or university may “formalize the institutional research function” into a single office: “This memo, while referring frequently to the ‘institutional researcher,’ has focused on institutional research as a function with a minimum of specific implications for organization. There are many organizational options available. These range from utilizing existing personnel in existing units to the creation of an office of institutional research with a director and staff…Clearly, no prescription for success can be suggested here. Too much depends upon the size, style, and needs of the individual college or university.”
In the first official document released by the AIR to advise colleges and universities that had not yet established institutional research offices, the association’s leadership effectively laid the foundations for the stagnation of institutional research and the profession’s shift away from the scientific study of higher education in centralized administrative units. To learn more about the failure of the Association for Institutional Research to deliver on the promise of institutional research as envisioned by its first practitioners, 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.