The AIR National Survey of Institutional Research Offices is a nationally representative longitudinal study of the IR Office. This project provides data to better understand the national state of the IR/IE function and gives leaders of the IR/IE office data to benchmark their office operations against their peers. 

When this project was launched, it was AIR’s expectation to conduct this project every two years; the third iteration would have been launched in October 2020. 

The coronavirus pandemic has upended higher education. Between staff furloughs, working from home, hiring freezes, a surge in data requests, and an unprecedented level of distance learning, the work of IR/IE is fundamentally different than ever before. What we don’t yet know is when, or if, operations will return to normal. 

In any longitudinal benchmarking project, the goal is to provide credible and comparable data to help support planning and resource allocation. However, because of the changes to higher education and the IR/IE office, data collected this fall would not be comparable to years past. For that reason, AIR has decided to delay the launch of the third iteration to October 2021 in hopes that those data will be more useful.