American higher education faces a challenging environment. Decreasing state appropriations, rising costs, and tightening budgets have left American colleges and universities scrambling to achieve their missions with ever more limited resources. Campus leaders have therefore increasingly relied upon institutional research and strategic planning departments to make transparent and rational decisions and to promote good stewardship of critical but finite resources. Institutional Research Initiatives in Higher Education illustrates the wealth of institutional research activities occurring in American higher education. Featuring chapters by a prominent mix of authors representing community colleges, traditional undergraduate institutions, land grant institutions, research and flagship universities, and state agencies, this book provides numerous insights into the contemporary challenges, innovative programs, and best practices in institutional research. With contributors from a variety of regions and types of institutions, each chapter provides rigorous analysis of campus-based research activities in areas such as strategic planning, admissions and enrollment management, assessment and compliance, and financial planning and budgeting. Like the departments it studies, Institutional Research Initiatives in Higher Education is an invaluable resource for university administrators, researchers, and policymakers alike.

American higher education faces a challenging environment. Decreasing state appropriations, rising costs, and tightening budgets have left American colleges and universities scrambling to achieve their missions with ever more limited resources. Campus leaders have therefore increasingly relied upon institutional research and strategic planning departments to make transparent and rational decisions and to promote good stewardship of critical but finite resources. Institutional Research Initiatives in Higher Education illustrates the wealth of institutional research activities occurring in American higher education. Featuring chapters by a prominent mix of authors representing community colleges, traditional undergraduate institutions, land grant institutions, research and flagship universities, and state agencies, this book provides numerous insights into the contemporary challenges, innovative programs, and best practices in institutional research. With contributors from a variety of regions and types of institutions, each chapter provides rigorous analysis of campus-based research activities in areas such as strategic planning, admissions and enrollment management, assessment and compliance, and financial planning and budgeting. Like the departments it studies, Institutional Research Initiatives in Higher Education is an invaluable resource for university administrators, researchers, and policymakers alike.

This volume of Transforming Institutions follows from and builds on its predecessor of five years ago (Weaver et al., 2015) with a mix of case studies, models, and analyses. The authors and editors provide key perspectives for advancing change initiatives in higher education and STEM education. The Transforming Institutions conferences and book series began with the first convening in 2011 at Purdue University, organized by the Discovery Learning Research Center (DLRC), and continues with the 2019 and 2021 Transforming Institutions Conferences. The meeting sought then, as it still does, to bring together researchers, academic leaders, national organizations and funding agency representatives to discuss the practical aspects of changing institutional practices to align with the large body of evidence in the field. The editors and authors of this volume consider this work to be a beginning and hope it will be a call to action for every reader.View this book online at: http://openbooks.library.umass.edu/ascnti2020/

Be the Change your Institution Needs What are leaders in research saying about Data Science in Higher Education? "Where has this book been all these years? This is THE starting point for researchers looking for a leg up in today's college environment. Two parts discussion, one part methodology, and one part witty humor. I love it!" "Buy this book for your analysts. They and your college will thank you." "This is the only book on data science specific for higher education research that covers both theory and practice. I'm not a programmer at all, and I found this book very enjoyable. You wont regret it -- I know I don't!" "When our department was tasked with coming up with a predictive 'machine-learning' model, we hired Jesse to help us. His charisma and knowledge are unmatched, and this book only helps to breathe fresh life into issues in research today that are all too often swept under the rug." Discover the tools to take your institution to the next level! Data Science in higher education is the process of turning raw institutional data into actionable intelligence. With this introduction to foundational topics in machine learning and predictive analytics, ambitious leaders in research can develop and employ sophisticated predictive models to better inform their institution's decision-making process. You don't need an advanced degree in math or statistics to do data science. With the open-source statistical programming language R, you'll learn how to tackle real-life institutional data challenges (with actual institutional data!) by going step-by-step through different case studies. Topics include: Simple, Multiple, & Logistic Regression Techniques, and Naive Bayes Classifiers Best Practices for Data Scientists in Higher Education Narrative-style stories, gotchas, and insights from actual data science jobs at colleges and universities "Forget the textbooks. This is a book on data science written for institutional researchers *by* an institutional researcher. You need this book."------------------------------------------ Data Science is the art of carefully picking through that pile of book pages and putting together a complete book. It's the art of developing a narrative for your data, so that all the raw information that your institution warehouses and reports in bar charts and histograms is replaced with actionable intelligence. Here's what we know: Data science can and should be an integral part of college and university operations. Institutional effectiveness should be working side-by-side with faculty and educators to collect, clean, and mine through data of current and past students' behaviors in order to better empower counseling and advisement services (whether virtual or otherwise). Data itself should be considered an asset to an institution, and the data mining process a necessary function of institutional operations. So how do we do it? It starts with a solid perspective and great research tools. With Data Science in Higher Education you'll learn about and solve real-world institutional problems with open-source tools and machine learning research techniques. Using R, you'll tackle case studies from real colleges and develop predictive analytical solutions to problems that colleges and universities face to this day.

Students who participate in scientific research as undergraduates report gaining many benefits from the experience. However, undergraduate research done independently under a faculty member's guidance or as part of an internship, regardless of its individual benefits, is inherently limited in its overall impact. Faculty members and sponsoring companies have limited time and funding to support undergraduate researchers, and most institutions have available (or have allocated) only enough human and financial resources to involve a small fraction of their undergraduates in such experiences. Many more students can be involved as undergraduate researchers if they do scientific research either collectively or individually as part of a regularly scheduled course. Course-based research experiences have been shown to provide students with many of the same benefits acquired from a mentored summer research experience, assuming that sufficient class time is invested, and several different potential advantages. In order to further explore this issue, the Division on Earth and Life Studies and the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education organized a convocation meant to examine the efficacy of engaging large numbers of undergraduate students who are enrolled in traditional academic year courses in the life and related sciences in original research, civic engagement around scientific issues, and/or intensive study of research methods and scientific publications at both two- and four-year colleges and universities. Participants explored the benefits and costs of offering students such experiences and the ways that such efforts may both influence and be influenced by issues such as institutional governance, available resources, and professional expectations of faculty. Integrating Discovery-Based Research into the Undergraduate Curriculum summarizes the presentations and discussions from this event.