What is Institutional Research, Anyhow?

Penn State’s distinguished professor emeritus Patrick Terenzini is one of the giants of higher education scholarship. He is best known as coauthor (with Ernest Pascarella) of one of the most useful and most heavily cited books in the field. How College Affects Students has been called “the essential reference” by Jacqueline King, director of policy analysis at the American Council for Education; a “landmark synthesis” by Peter Ewell, senior associate at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems; and an “encyclopedic masterpiece” by George Kuh, professor and director of the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University. 

What may be less well known is that Pat has strong roots as an administrator and practitioner as well. In the 1980s, he was director of the office of institutional research at SUNY Albany. He is also past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education and was for many years editor of the Jossey-Bass series New Directions in Institutional Research. And he has received pretty much every conceivable award in the IR field. In short, much of what my generation of IR practitioners has been able to accomplish is because we’ve followed a path blazed by Patrick Terenzini.
I can’t think of anyone better qualified than Dr. Terenzini to help define institutional research (IR). Luckily for us, in 1999 Pat published a chapter “On the Nature of Institutional Research and the Skills It Requires.” His thinking has influenced my own ideas, and it’s useful to describe what we’re trying to accomplish with the Institutional Research Interest Group at Penn State.
In that 1999 chapter, Pat emphasized a view of institutional research as “organizational intelligence” — construing that “to refer to the data gathered about an institution, to their analysis and transformation into information, and to the insight and informed sense of the organization that a competent institutional researcher brings to the interpretation of that information.”
Pat laid out three categories of organizational intelligence or IR. Tier 1 is technical/analytic intelligence, encompassing the factual information and methods that provide the basic building blocks of defining, counting, and measuring. This category includes computer skills such as database management, familiarity with data coding structures and conventions, and the use of software applications. Tier 2 is issues intelligence, which involves knowledge of the substantive problems (say, developing budgets or evaluating programs) to which Tier 1 information can be brought to bear. For example, Tier 1 skills enable the production of accurate enrollment data and enrollment projection numbers; Tier 2 adds an understanding of institutional processes and issues, connecting those numbers to enrollment planning, and perhaps to budget, facilities, curriculum, and human resources planning as well. Tier 3 is contextual intelligence, which is knowledge of higher education in general and of the particular college or university where the IR practitioner works. Tier 3 adds to Tier 1 and Tier 2 skills what Pat calls “organizational savvy”– enabling prudent and intelligent application of technical knowledge to locally important versions of more general issues and developments (such as external economic, political, and demographic changes). 
The Penn State IR Interest Group
No senior administrators created the Penn State IR Interest Group. We are not a committee and we do not have a charge. This is a voluntary, self-formed collaboration — what is sometimes described as a “community of practice.”
A community of practice can be loosely defined as a group of people who share a common interest in some domain, who want to gain knowledge and exchange information related to that field. This describes how we are thinking about the Penn State IR Interest Group. The domain is IR broadly defined — that is, as outlined by Dr. Terenzini. In fact, the early instigators of the Penn State IR Interest Group bring perspectives from all three of Terenzini’s three tiers. Some of us, for example, have jobs that focus primarily on data definition, retrieval, and presentation. Others work more in data analysis, trying to make it useful for decision-making in some specific context, such as curriculum planning on a campus, or understanding student retention at the university level.
We believe that there are many excellent data and analysis resources at Penn State. But we also suspect that there are scores or (more likely) hundreds of people who are doing IR but may not know it, or who don’t have strong connections to others trying to use similar tools or to solve similar challenges. In either case, we believe that the University can do a better job of communication, collaboration, and sharing in the increasingly pertinent domain of IR. Our goal is to help those (including ourselves!) who produce, analyze, and use data for planning and decision-making to do so more effectively. 
We think that an IR community of practice would be useful at Penn State.It would provide a forum for sharing on a variety of topics in the IR realm. We don’t have an agenda, other than to begin discussion about whether this would be of value to  Penn State colleagues — and if so, to start building the foundation for an IR community of practice at the University.