Summer passed by way too quickly!With many warm feelings remaining from the AIR Forum in June, we now gear up for a new academic year. As we move toward closing the pandemic (perhaps a wishful hope?), it is even clearer ...

Institutional data capacity is largely dependent on the IR Office. And the amount of information that an IR Office can produce is strongly tied to the size of that office. So, what drives the size of the IR Office? In sh...

Institutional researchers (IR) are invited to participate in a recently launched study, Understanding Faculty, Academic Careers, and Environments in Service of Equity. In particular, IR professionals are asked to partici...

U.S. News is providing, free of charge to any institutional researcher, Excel spreadsheets with ranking data that appear in the main rankings tables in the Best Colleges 2022-2023 Edition guide book. These spreadshe...

The AIR Bylaws were updated by a vote of the members present at the AIR Annual Business Meeting on Wednesday, June 8, in Phoenix. Following the 2021 AIR leadership elections, the 2020-2021 Nomination and Elections Commit...

On May 9, the AIR Board of Directors voted to amend its Ends policy, which serves as the organization’s mission statement. The Board added just 8 words, but those additions communicate the organization’s exis...

When I hear “data and analytics culture,” I immediately think of the work Jason Simon and his team are doing at the University of North Texas (UNT). Jason Simon, Ph.D., Associate Vice President of ...

When I began working in the field of institutional research (IR) in 2010, my daily tasks consisted of completing some externally mandated reports and a few ad hoc internal requests. Today, there are daily data requests, ...

The Admissions Research Consortium (ARC) aims to help colleges understand how the impacts of the pandemic are shaping their incoming classes, and how these impacts might continue to affect college performance outcomes in...

Dear AIR Colleagues, By the time you read this, the changing of the guard will have taken place, and I must bid you farewell as AIR President. Orientation, training, a couple dozen board meetings, opportunities to engage...

New research from CUPA-HR shows that higher education institutions are in the midst of a talent crisis, as many staff, professionals and administrators are considering other employment opportunities due to dissatisfactio...

NCES has recently published a webpage providing information on the similarities and differences between the three IPEDS surveys components primarily focused on measuring student success: Graduation Rates (GR), Graduation...

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) published the 2022 Condition of Education, which contains key indicators on all levels of education, labor force outcomes, and international comparisons. Dow...

The AIR community mourns the loss of Alexander Astin, who was a pioneer of student experience research and theories and professor emeritus at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies. He passed away May 18 ...

Distance measures are an important component of many techniques found used throughout data science. Distance measures are any measure that can help us quantify the distance between two points in any given coordinate syst...

Significant ethical scandals are thankfully rare in institutional research and effectiveness (IR/IE). Every few years brings a case of an institution that has deliberately falsified data, usually data for external survey...

Amid the election for our new AIR leaders, I think it is important as you contemplate who to vote for to reflect on the purpose of your vote. I fundamentally believe the leaders we choose are an image of our hope fo...

AIR talked to Mark Umbricht, Director of Data Analysis and Research at University of North Carolina System, to chat about how his 2018 AIR Forum session was referenced in Ron Lieber’s book, The Price You ...

Institutional Research (IR) professionals intimately understand that good data can facilitate smart decisions. That truth applies to the field of IR, too. The National Survey of IR Offices is the premier source of ...

Congratulations to the latest recipients of the Charles F. Elton Best Paper Award: Qingmin Shi, John R. Crooker, Christina Drum, and Brent M. Drake, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their paper, “Investigation of t...