Almost fifty years of continuous institutional research at colleges and universities, as well as statewide, built a comprehensive portfolio of research and scholarship. Heading into the 1960s, institutional researchers and their like-minded colleagues among accreditors and other professional associations greatly extended the scope of activities for the study of higher education.
To this point in the field’s history, the practitioners of institutional research in administrative offices at colleges and universities enjoyed an intellectual freedom to pursue the possibilities of their field with full regard for the mission of higher education for American democracy. In many respects, these institutional researchers proved themselves far ahead of their time in the vision they demonstrated for the future of the profession before the widespread existence of key technologies: student information systems, statistical software for the social sciences (SPSS, R, and the like), spreadsheets, visualization software, intranets, color monitors, and on and on. The praxis of institutional research revealed to several scholars what was necessary for the design of computing technology to provide the most value to college and university administration as well as the “complex special apparatus” necessary to advance institutional research as a social science. Ultimately, others recognized the need for an authentic institutional research paradigm to empower a scientific community for the study of higher education settings. In a manner, the original authors of institutional research literature exemplified the best principles of a scientific community: engaged in publications and conferences for the exchange and scrutiny of results, generalizing standards and definitions about the nature of higher education institutions, and imagining technological apparatuses to enable the replication of studies. As Philip H. Tyrrell of the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute shrewdly noted, “there is not a spectrum of institutional research; there are spectra.”
Presciently, Tyrrell advised his colleagues that institutional research was at a turning point in the mid-1960s: “Institutional research, throughout American higher education, is now at a point, where a re-examination of concepts, assumptions, and strategy is necessary. Institutional researchers should take this re-examination upon themselves, lest others do it for them (my emphasis).” To learn more about early practitioners’ advances to define the parameters of institutional research as a social science, see my new history of the profession, Outsourcing Student Success, a history of institutional research and its significance for the future of higher education. Now available on Amazon.