Institutional Assessment: The Art of Self-Reflection

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Institutional Assessment: The Art of Self-Reflection

8/30/2006

By Matt Villano

Going It Alone

Interestingly, many of the most notable advancements in institutional assessment are proprietary. At Texas A&M, for instance, technologists have developed a homegrown database, based on Microsoft Access, in order to chart institutional performance by keeping tabs on what’s happening with faculty members. The database, which users can access from a web-based interface, tracks various statistics about faculty productivity for publishing, grants, awards, editorships, classes taught, and graduate students completed. University administrators utilize data from the program to evaluate individual programs, certain clusters of departments, and sometimes even the school as a whole.

The Heart of It All

Comparing your data against that from NCES? Here’s what you should know. Most schools that engage in institutional assessment compare data of their own against data from the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the Department of Education. All of the information that g'es in and out of NCES runs through one program—the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS — which collects, sorts, analyzes, and distributes data on demand.

Specifically, IPEDS is a system of surveys designed to collect data from all primary providers of postsecondary education. It is built around a series of interrelated surveys to collect institution-level data in such areas as enrollment, program completions, faculty, staff, and finances. This data is collected and disseminated through a web-based interface called the IPEDS Peer Analysis System.

IPEDS is nothing new; the Higher Education Act of 1992 mandated that schools complete IPEDS surveys in a timely and accurate manner, and NCES started data collection the following year. Between 1993 and 2000, NCES continually improved the IPEDS data collection instruments and the list of institutions surveyed. Then, in 2000, data collection was converted from a paper-based to a fully web-based system.

Elise Miller, program director of the Postsecondary Institutional Studies Program at NCES, says IPEDS supersedes the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS), a similar set of surveys that collected data from 1965-1986, from a more limited universe of accredited institutions of higher education.

“In addition to approximately 3,600 HEGIS institutions, IPEDS includes many schools that are not accredited, and institutions providing postsecondary training in occupational and vocational programs, including proprietary schools and institutions,” she says. “This expanded universe consists of some 6,800 postsecondary education providers.”

Most recently, IPEDS added the IPEDS College Opportunities Online Locator, or IPEDS COOL. The site is designed to help students and their parents understand the differences between colleges. Users can select colleges based on location, program, or degree offerings, and obtain information on admissions, tuition, room and board, graduation rates, accreditation status, financial aid, and enrollment.

Feeding the database is a process that takes all year. Becky Carr, assistant dean for administrative services, explains that, toward the end of every year, her department administers to faculty members paper-based evaluations on various subjects. When the evaluations are complete, a data analyst inputs the statistics into the database, where department heads and other administrators can access the material on demand. Users can view data for specific areas, or they can employ a special feature that takes a broader, more comprehensive look at a variety of categories at once. The goal: to give officials an evidentiary look at how things are going.

“We can do several things with this data,” says Carr, who estimates the cost of this system as not much beyond the annual salary of her data analyst and the dollars spent yearly on server capacity. “Most importantly, we get a good sense of faculty productivity and [help with planning] for the future.”

This summer, at the behest of Texas A&M’s provost, Carr’s department used the assessment process to investigate faculty diversity over time. For the purposes of this particular study, Carr’s department established five different categories to describe the ethnic background of new hires: White, African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, and International (a grouping that incorporated everyone else). By tracking the ethnicities of recent hires, the school was able to chart how the diversity of its faculty had changed. The results were projections for the 2006- 2007 year that indicated a sharp increase (almost three times the increase between 2004/2005 and 2005/2006) in the number of African-American faculty members (see “Faculty Diversity at Texas A&M”).