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.

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.

This report summarizes proceedings and conclusions of a two-day national planning workshop to further the assessment of national postsecondary outcomes, as suggested by Goal 6.5 of the National Education Goals, and to determine how the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the states might work more effectively to develop mutually-supportive postsecondary assessment activities and policies. Conclusions of the workshop indicate that there is no immediate possibility of aggregating state-level data on postsecondary outcomes to create a usable national indicator. But they do suggest other ways in which the states and the federal government might work together to improve the quality of the data. Section 1 provides background information and an overview of the workshop. Section 2 presents results of an inventory of state activities. Section 3 describes the workshop's major discussion themes and conclusions concerning: (1) the current political context for postsecondary assessment; (2) the corresponding methodological context; and (3) results of working sessions. Section 4 provides conclusions, policy implications, and possible next steps. Appendices include, in addition to the workshop agenda and participants list, a paper describing current activities of the NCES and individual background papers on each state's activities in postsecondary assessment. Also appended are the texts of the following prepared papers: "What Political Leaders Expect from Postsecondary Assessment" (Charles S. Lenth); "Perspective from the National Education Goals Panel" (Ken Nelson); "The State Perspective" (Mark D. Musick); "The Virginia Experience" (Margaret A. Miller); "Making Assessment Essential without Legislative Mandates: The Missouri Experience" (Ava L. Fajen et al.); and "Methodological Concerns: An ETS Perspective" (John Mazzeo). (MAH)