National Survey Data Bite

It’s challenging to be the director of an IR office. How many staff should you have? What kinds of work should those staff do? What roles should those staff be in? This month, we look at the staff roles within an I...

How do you spend your day-to-day time? Do your colleagues allocate the same time? The 2018 National Survey of IR Offices asked office leaders to estimate the percentage of their time to various activities. Using demonstr...

Why benchmark? A benchmarking project allows you to access credible information about your peer or aspirant IR Offices. That information can help you understand if your office is performing efficiently and effectively, a...

The AIR National Survey of IR Offices has collected data from over 1,000 IR offices on metrics such as staffing, compensation, work produced, and clients served. Complete the survey by June 30, 2019, to take advant...

The U.S. institutional research office does not follow a common organizational structure. Each IR office evolved to serve the unique needs of their institution. However, there are a few information studies that a lot of ...

When you walk around AIR’s annual conference, the Forum, or a regional or state affiliated organization’s conference, you will hear attendees talking about the wide variety of work their office does – b...

The Statement of Aspirational Practice for Institutional Research advances the need for executive level leadership of the data and analytics function at post-secondary institutions. The role is “broader than a trad...

The 2018 National Survey of IR Offices provides a tool for internal reporting and comparison to peer institutions. To date, 863 have participated.   RESPONSES     REPORTING Participants who complete...

AIR conducted the National Survey of IR Offices in fall 2015. One of the questions on the survey asked Directors of the IR Office how their office size has changed compared to three years prior. We found that approximate...

In this month's Data Bite, we explore the upcoming NSIRO survey. On June 21, 2018, over 350 people attended the AIR webinar, Using the National Survey of IR Offices Data to Inform Decision Making, with instructor Darlena...

In this month’s Data Bite, we explore the clients of the IR Office. We categorized the number of clients served by the IR Office and found that 17% of IR Offices serve a limited number of institutional offices/unit...

Gaining access to data can be challenging for some IR Offices; especially Human Resources (HR) salary data. During the 2015 National Survey of IR Offices, we learned that, on average, 42% of IR Offices had unrestricted a...

Last month, we looked at the average number of hours spent by directors and found that data collection and management occupied the largest segment of time, followed closely by analyzing those data and disseminating resul...

How do you spend your days in the IR Office? We asked participants of the National Survey of IR Offices to report how the Director of the IR Office and other IR professional staff (e.g., analysts, technical staff, etc.) ...

In the National Survey of IR Offices Report (free PDF report), we grouped institutions by their task “personality” and identified three patterns: Broad (IR Offices who are engaged in nearly every data in...

IR and IT have a close working relationships at most institutions. But, exactly, what does that relationship look like? Results from the National Survey of IR Offices shows that between 68% and 76% of IR Offices (dependi...

We’ve explored the number of professional IR staff in IR offices in previous Data Bites. This month, we'll look at the types of staff involved.  Based on what we learned from the 2016 National Survey...

In June, we explored the "personality" of IR Offices by sector and found that offices at public 4-year institutions were more likely to have broad responsibilities while private, not-for-profit, 4-year institutions were ...

Every U.S. postsecondary institution that awards federal financial aid must submit data to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as part of the Integrated Postsecondary ...

The Statement of Aspirational Practice for Institutional Research calls for intentional building and support of the institutional research function—the collection of data users and producers across an ins...