Special Features

As fall sets in, we begin another year focusing on the myriad of tasks before us. But let me draw your attention to an important announcement - AIR has opened nominations for the 2024-2025 AIR Board of Directors an...

Published on September 8, 2023, the 2022–2023 AIR annual report details the association’s work over the past year. The AIR Board of Directors and AIR Staff remain committed to supporting, connecting, and empo...

Have you ever seen a large corn field or tried to find your way out of a corn maze? With so much corn, it is often difficult to identify a reference point to find your way out.Much like a large field where you can easily...

Over the past 10 years, the Office of Institutional Research at Case Western Reserve University has built partnerships across student-facing offices, bringing out the best in both student affairs and Institutional Resear...

Each year, AIR recognizes and celebrates individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the success of the association and the profession through their leadership, service, and scholarship. AIR is also pleased ...

Talking about the dataConsider the following two quotes. The first reflects the purposes of traditional learning outcomes assessment:“Assessment asks the question regarding what students know and how they came to k...

Many years ago, at a former institution, I was in a back room deciding which countless old files could be discarded to make room for new ones. I was a new hire and eagerly used this time to learn some institutional histo...

The American Council on Education (ACE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced in February 2022 that they would partner on reimagining the Carnegie Classifications. As part of that agreemen...

Data-informed decision making continues to be a focal point for higher education leaders around the world, and professionals who endeavor tasks related to institutional research continue to grow in many regions acros...

What Is Strategic Analytics?Strategic analytics is a relatively new concept for institutional research and effectiveness in higher education. Currently, a small number of universities have adopted “strategic analyt...

I remember well my first AIR Forum. The year was 1997 and the Forum was in Orlando. I was relatively new to institutional research (IR), and the convergence of so many IR people at the national meeting was both exhilarat...

Although the COVID-19 pandemic forced a temporary shift in focus, we now see a return to further development and implementation of advanced technologies and broader uses of Big Data in education and other work sector...

Although several studies have examined diversity and inclusion in higher education, they have largely overlooked online colleges and universities. Online education has become more popular due to the COVID-19 pandemic and...

The few of us in this world who have endeavored to hone our skills and talents in the field of institutional research (IR) do so with the thought that ours is a truly unique profession. I mean, if one thinks about it, th...

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...

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...

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 ...