One of the primary responsibilities of offices of Institutional Research (IR) is responding to ad hoc requests for data on students, faculty, and staff at their institutions. Some of these ad hoc requests are for persona...

In a recently published article in AIR Professional File (Sturgis, Marchand, Miller, Xu, and Castiglioni, 2022), I, along with my co-authors, introduce generalizability theory (G-theory) to institutional research (IR) pr...

As we enter these final days of 2022, I extend warm greetings to the AIR community. It is a time of year to celebrate, to appreciate, and to anticipate. And as I reflect back on the last year at AIR, we have much to cele...

The Association for Institutional Research (AIR), EDUCAUSE, and the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) seek a consultant to lead a project to develop a succinct, actionable guide to...

The Association for Institutional Research (AIR), EDUCAUSE, and the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) have been awarded a $500,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundatio...

Funding from the Gates Foundation will support student success effortsNovember 21, 2022 (Washington, DC)—The Association for Institutional Research (AIR), EDUCAUSE, and the National Association of College and Unive...

Recently, the federal government asked institutions that received Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) funding to report data for year two of the reporting cycle. The request this year included multiple items t...

Performance management and professional development are frequently discussed interchangeably, yet one is a reflection on the past while the other is forward looking. When I think of performance management, I think ab...

A former provost, who is now a college president, told me that IR is “The Keeper of Truth.” This seems logical, as IR should be the point of contact for both internal data analysis and external data repor...

Institutional researchers are often tasked with synthesizing large amounts of data, perhaps by visualizing it in charts or summarizing it in tabular format. Allowing users to interact with these charts or tables by sorti...

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 ...

IntroductionThis eAIR Tech Tip provides advice for institutional researchers who utilize Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data for benchmarking, look-back, market, and similar landscape analyses. Wi...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, ...