Institutional research (IR) is a growing, applied, and interdisciplinary area that attracts people from a variety of fields, including computer programmers, statisticians, and administrators and faculty from every discipline to work in archiving, analyzing, and reporting on all aspects of higher education information systems. Cases on Institutional Research Systems is a reference book for institutional research, appealing to novice and expert IR professionals and the administrators and policymakers that rely on their data. By presenting a variety of institutional perspectives, the book depicts the challenges and solutions to those in higher education administration, and state, federal, and even international accreditation.

Institutional effectiveness (IE) is an emerging structural design in colleges and universities that is the antidote to its traditional loose-coupling where independence and autonomy lead to a lack of strategic intent. The focus is on "creating coherence" or developing an approach that leads to greater interdependency, greater coordination, and more information flow. The book begins with an explanation of IE and the environmental imperatives that suggest why it is critical to higher education. Systems thinking, organizational design, and model building are the core chapters followed by an extensive chapter on challenges to the IE imperative. Extensive case studies are used in each chapter as well as "Questions to Ask" sections. An expanded "Resources" appendix is useful for those who need to explore the cross-functional nature of institutional effectiveness at their institutions. This is the second book in a Fieldbook series. The first-Future College Fieldbook: Mission, Vision, and Values in Higher Education (2016)-is being used in strategic planning sessions and retreats to help institutions with the difficult job of direction-setting. The general approach to the series is to use strong research and disciplinary bases for the work and to also include a large number of current examples from different institutional types.

Institutional research is more relevant today than ever before as growing pressures for improved student learning and increased institutional accountability motivate higher education to effectively use ever-expanding data and information resources. As the most current and comprehensive volume on the topic, the Handbook describes the fundamental knowledge, techniques, and strategies that define institutional research. The book contains an overview of the profession and its history, examines how institutional research supports executive and academic leadership and governance, and discusses the varied ways data from federal, state, and campus sources are used by research professionals. With contributions from leading experts in the field, this important resource reviews the analytic tools, techniques, and methodologies used by institutional researchers in their professional practice and covers a wide range of topics such as: conducting institutional research; statistical applications; comparative analyses; quality control systems; measuring student, faculty, and staff opinions; and management activities designed to improve organizational effectiveness.

Multilevel modeling is an increasingly popular multivariate technique that is widely applied in the social sciences. Increasingly, practitioners are making instructional decisions based on results from their multivariate analyses, which often come from nested data that lend themselves to multilevel modeling techniques. As data-driven decision making becomes more critical to colleges and universities, multilevel modeling is a tool that will lead to more efficient estimates and enhance understanding of complex relationships. This volume illustrates both the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of multilevel modeling in IR. It introduces the fundamental concepts of multilevel modeling techniques in a conceptual and technical manner. Providing a range of examples of nested models that are based on linear and categorical outcomes, it then offers important suggestions about presenting results of multilevel models through charts and graphs. This is the 154th volume of this Jossey-Bass quarterly report series. Always timely and comprehensive, New Directions for Institutional Research provides planners and administrators in all types of academic institutions with guidelines in such areas as resource coordination, information analysis, program evaluation, and institutional management.

In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.