Aided by the largess of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Association for Institutional Research launched an initiative in 2014, “Improving & Transforming Institutional Research in Postsecondary Education.” Addressing the critical assessment of the profession in the report by the National Association of System Heads (NASH) (Part 8), the association weakly acknowledged “a concern that current IR [institutional research] practices are not adequate for the challenges that face decision makers today.” Ironically, the association summarized its fifty-year stewardship of the profession in the statement of purpose for the initiative: “the current function of IR is not clearly defined, and the future path of IR is unknown.” To rectify the plight of the profession for its four thousand members, the association launched yet another survey of offices of institutional research at colleges and universities across the nation in its effort to draft statements of aspirational practices for the future of institutional research.
By the time the association released the first draft of its aspirations, a sense of urgency to improve the offices of institutional research to meet the demands of the nation’s public university systems had subsided. Instead, the “Brief Summary” signaled a return to the priorities of the consensus paradigm for institutional research. The opening section recommits to the “50-year collaborative nature of the institutional research field…a hybrid model that includes professionals, some of whom work in dedicated offices of institutional research, and others who work in various units across the institution and share in efforts to collect, interpret, and use data to achieve an institution’s mission.” The summary statement praises the ability of units and virtual offices overseeing the functions of institutional research and then laments that “dedicated staff in ‘traditional’ offices of institutional research” no longer fulfill its designated role in the elaborate profusion of institutional research. Professionalization of the staff function in administrative offices of institutional research retarded the effectiveness and academic excellence of “decision makers—from managers to deans and vice presidents” who knew best “their unit’s [sic] capacity to conduct data studies that align with their own information needs.”
Shifting to the outlines of a solution, the summary statement intimates institutional research suffers from too much centralization or insufficient decentralization. A more elaborate profusion of institutional research functions must be secured, and units must hold precedence over the centralized office of institutional research. In order to remove “obstacles for institutional studies,” the summary posits, functional directors and vice presidents must take greater responsibility for the organization of institutional research, echoing Victor Borden’s claim for the benefits of action research. The office of institutional research must curtail its aspirations and leave institutional research functions to the units. Moreover, the brief suggests that the concept of “decision-makers” also must become more generalized to include nearly any person with the potential to consume institutional data. The decision-making by unit leaders also tends toward too much centralization, and steps must be taken to make institutional research functions more responsive to “the thousands of decisions made by students themselves about their higher education experiences, by faculty about their own teaching and interactions with students, and by professional staff who work directly with students.” In short, institutional research functions fail to achieve the goals of academic excellence because they are overly beholden to the administrative “structure” created for executive and managerial decision-making at colleges and universities.
As a whole, the brief summary of aspirational statements subsequently released by the Association for Institutional Research amplifies the perception of institutional research as a function unsuited for professionalization. As the AIR policy brief claims, the aspirational statements intend to be an “active re-envisioning of the institutional research function (my emphasis),” not an active re-envisioning of the profession as the NASH report advised.
As when previous events exposed the unresolved problems in the consensus paradigm of institutional research, the leadership of the Association for Institutional Research dutifully doubled down on its commitment to institutional research as a nonprofessional function best left to the decision-making prowess of anyone but the professional institutional researchers in colleges or universities. As the association worked through its response to the challenges presented by the NASH report, the priorities of the consensus paradigm again reasserted control over the future of institutional research functions as an elaborate profusion in higher education. Despite ample evidence that higher education policy makers and decision-makers long for more rigorous, reliable, and valid research about the performance of students and institutions, the Association for Institutional Research once again counseled institutional researchers to plan for and accept an increasingly deprofessionalized role due to the disruption of technological innovations.
To learn more about role of the Association for Institutional Research in the promotion of the consensus paradigm and its resistance to the professionalization of institutional research 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.