Institutional Research

It is not about the integrity of your data; it is for the integrity of your leadership.

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Institutional Research Expertise

How many applicants did we have this year? What is the average SAT and ACT scores among incoming students? How many students did we retain on census date? What is our graduation rate?

These are not simply questions about facts or numbers. These are questions for research design and measurement of the student experience and outcomes. A lack of institutional research expertise substantially increases the probability an institution may be submitting misleading information about college performance to the public.

Historia|Research offers a full range of IR services to mitigate the chances that misreporting compromises your institutional reputation and integrity. We specialize in building out IR capacity internally in order to bring greater integrity to external submissions. More importantly, we put institutions in position to benefit from evidence-based strategic planning and effective improvements. In short, we provide road maps to institutions that aspire to join national and global initiatives to foster better educators and student outcomes.

 

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Institutional Research Services

Submission Integrity Audits	We offer confidential services to determine how well your institution complies with the specifications for performance indicators submitted to the federal government for publication on its College Navigator Web site or to college guide publishers to create national and regional rankings. Our comprehensive approach to submission audits assesses skill competencies, business processes, information systems, reporting routines, and more in order to build confidence in an institution’s reporting portfolio.
Automated IPEDS and CDS Submissions	We secure the integrity of annual external submissions by automating key processes that reduce the potential for error from manual data entry. While day-to-day operations must rely on the human hand to make keystrokes to capture information, federal and state agencies often enable institutional researchers to prepare files that may be easily uploaded into the external information systems. Our team re-formats the records from your student information systems to create data sets meeting upload specifications, drastically reducing the time staff spends on submission preparation and ensuring that your institution follows the same research methodology year-to-year.
Dashboard Design	Our dashboard designs allow executives and decision makers to quickly review the key performance indicators and institutional effectiveness measures of their operations and initiatives. Our approach to metric calculations closely adheres to research specifications and data definitions for external submissions to further maintain overall research integrity, while bolstering decision-support systems that require routine observation of progress indicators to visualize the incremental momentum toward goals and intended outcomes.
Strategic Data Set Design	Strategic insights and the power of predictive analytics require data sets compiled to meet the parameters of social scientific research. Our research solutions do not require exorbitant expenditures for data warehouses or servers storing terabytes of data. We deploy the practices and principles of social scientific research to transform your transactional databases into strategic resources for cohort, decision tree, regression, and other methods of complex analysis. We offer institutions at all Carnegie levels the competitive advantages of “big data” without huge costs.
Mission-Centric Quality Assurance	Our experts understand that student learning is the primary focus of the academic enterprise and that the uniqueness of the student experience is the key driver of an institution’s distinction. We perform mission-centric quality assurance reviews to determine how well the administrative infrastructure supports the agency of academic programmers and the seamless delivery of student services to provide an integrated experience informed by the mission of the institution. Our qualitative research methods identify inter-departmental data sharing gaps and communication barriers that impede an institution’s ability to fulfill its unique promise to students.
Environmental Scanning	High school graduate projections, business cycles, the global middle class, federal college rankings, MOOCs: external factors ceaselessly influence the success of higher education institutions and leaders. Our researchers know how to isolate and prioritize the challenges facing particular institutions and their programs. We provide services ranging from targeted program market analyses to comprehensive environmental scans for the entire institution. Our surveys of the higher education landscape allow education leaders to foresee and prepare for the profound challenges confronting higher education in the 21st century.