• Is your institution making research-based decisions?
  
  
• Are you monitoring student satisfaction with
  campus programs and services?
  
  
• Do you know what campus programs and services
  are most important to your students?
  
  
• Is your institution regularly assessing and
  evaluating its programs and services?
  
  
• Are your student recruitment efforts tapping into all
  possible markets?
  
  
• Do you know the primary drivers of retention and
  attrition?

Institutional Research Corporation offers a wide-range of institutional research services to assist you in answering these questions.

IRC provides actionable insights to college administrators to facilitate short and long term planning. Recommendations are derived from the collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of institutional data.

DESCRIPTION OF SERVICES

Predictive Modeling - back to top

IRC recognizes the benefits of using institutional data to align decision-making with future goals.  By using predictive modeling, IRC is able to assist educational institutions with the implementation and development of data-driven operational procedures.  By capitalizing on attitudinal and behavioral information of prospective students, current students, and past students, predictive modeling enables academic institutions to streamline processes that improve administrative decision-making. 

Results of predictive modeling impacting decision-making include designing a program to increase student retention, targeted marketing campaigns to prospective students resulting in decreased marketing costs, implementing new student services to increase student satisfaction, and the development of a student study center to improve academic learning.   

Data Mining - back to top

IRC uses data mining software and techniques to uncover patterns and trends in institutional data.  Uncovering these patterns is crucial for decision-making because they reveal areas for improving operations and processes. The data mining techniques used by IRC are intended to help educational institutions make timely and informed decisions that achieve organizational goals and objectives.

The Cross Industry Standard Process Model used by IRC to conduct data mining projects consists of the following elements:

Business Understanding
This phase consists of identification of the project objectives and requirements from a business perspective, and then converting this knowledge into a data mining problem, definition, and a preliminary plan designed to achieve the objectives.

Data Understanding
The data understanding phase starts with initial data collection and proceeds with activities in order to get familiar with the data, to identify data quality problems, to discover insights into the data, and to detect interesting subsets to form hypotheses from hidden information.

Data Preparation
The data preparation phase covers all activities to construct the final dataset (data that will be fed into the modeling tool(s)) from the initial raw data. Data preparation tasks may be performed multiple times, and not in any prescribed order. Tasks include table, record, and attribute selection as well as transformation and cleaning of data for modeling tools.

Modeling
In this phase, various modeling techniques are selected and applied, and parameter estimates are generated from the analysis.  Typically, there are several techniques for the same data mining problem. Some techniques have specific data measurement requirements and must conform to those assumptions.

Evaluation
At this stage in the project, a model (or models) have been built that appear to have high quality from a data analysis perspective. It is important to thoroughly evaluate the model and review the steps executed to construct the model to be certain it properly achieves the business objectives. A key objective is to determine if there is an important business issue that has not been considered in the development of the model.

Deployment
Creation of the model is generally not the end of the project. Even if the purpose of the model is to increase knowledge of the data, the knowledge gained will need to be organized and presented in a way that customers can use it. Depending on the requirements, the deployment phase can be as simple as generating a report or as complex as implementing a repeatable data mining process. 

Survey Research - back to top

To determine whether educational institutions are providing adequate facilities and appropriate programs that meet student needs, community expectations, and government requirements, IRC conducts a variety of survey research projects.  These projects are designed to measure attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of students, staff, and community members and how such factors impact organizational goals.  Developing procedures and tools for monitoring students from the time they express interest in a particular school through matriculation, graduation, and participation in alumni activities, enables IRC to identify key factors that impact each stage of the college experience.  Identifying factors provides administrators with crucial information for directing institutional resources towards specific programs and services.         

Some examples of IRC survey research projects include:

• Student Satisfaction Surveys—designed to assess satisfaction with a broad range of college programs and services including quality of instruction, academic course offerings, housing, food services, tuition assistance, and campus climate.  
• Faculty/Staff Satisfaction Surveys—designed to measure satisfaction with such areas as the academic climate, student quality, instructional support, tenure process, and promotional opportunities. 
• Community Perception Surveys—designed to evaluate your school’s image, and how this affects your ability to recruit desirable students.
• Alumni Surveys—designed to determine participation level in alumni activities and assess the level of support among alumni for current programs and planned initiatives.
• Attrition Surveys—designed to identify the stage at which students drop out and key drivers impacting the decision to leave school.
• New Student Surveys—designed to assess marketing effectiveness and primary drivers impacting a student’s decision to enroll at your institution.     

Assessment and Evaluation - back to top

IRC provides assessment and evaluation of your programs and services.  It is important for institutions to identify, evaluate, and assess the success of their programs and services.  Monitoring institutional effectiveness is critical for determining, for example, the human and financial resources administrators should allocate to such programs and services. 

IRC’s ability to assess and evaluate operational procedures provides the opportunity to streamline processes resulting in increased efficiency and decreased costs.