Campus Reporting Strategy Proposal

Campus Reporting Strategy Proposal

• Overview of Campus Reporting
• Operational Reporting
  • Academic (class rosters)
  • Administrative (daily admissions counts)

Operational Reporting deals with the day-to-day and short-term concerns of various offices and narrowly defined functional areas.  Faculty need lists of students in their classes, Admissions requires data on applicants and transfer students, and executives need quick answers to make timely and effective policy decisions.  Operational reporting is decentralized and well developed in the BANNER system; training is typically the issue, when managers are not receiving needed operational reports.

• Strategic
• Institutional (management, longitudinal studies)
• Departmental/Divisional (program review, annual reports)

Strategic Reporting involves critical, long-term studies and reports, both at the institutional and departmental/divisional level.  Studies of retention, student success, grade distributions, compensation analyses, and external scans, are typical forms of institutional strategic reporting.  Much of this information may be incorporated into institutional and divisional planning.  Institutional Research typically produces these reports or provides much of the information departments and divisions require completing them.

• Historical (Fact Book)

Fact Books are historical sources of information and should never be confused with decision-support or ad hoc reporting.  They are not designed (nor intended) to supplant timely and effective reporting, either from Institutional Research or other responsible departments.

• External Reporting and Surveys
• Federal reporting (IPEDS)
• Institutional surveys (CDS, College Board)
• Consortium and Inter-Institution (AUC, CIC)
• Public Relations & Communications (Princeton Review, AJC)
• Program-specific surveys (Accreditation, Advancement)
• Other highly specialized surveys (NSF Financial Aid)

Surveys and external requests for institutional information may or may not pass through a “gatekeeper” for general coordination on campus.  Presently, surveys are going to any number of departments and being delivered, often very close to deadline, to Institutional Research.  Many times, IR has to return the survey to the department(s) responsible for maintaining the needed data for completion.  This is hardly effective survey coordination.

All broad, institutional surveys, as well as consortia requests, should be sent directly to Institutional Research, and IR will determine which department on campus is best suited to respond to each survey section.  For example, IPEDS requires extensive data on student financial aid, human resources data, and institutional finances - data to which IR may not even have direct or immediate access to on this campus.  However, IR often does know where the data exist and who may best address such survey questions.

Public Relations, program-specific, and highly specialized surveys should probably never come directly to Institutional Research, although IR will likely contribute some institutional data (general enrollment figures) for their completion.  Often, these general institutional data are already accessible through the Fact Book, College Board Survey, or the Common Data Set.  Likewise, data-extraction requests from external agencies involving student-level records should always be coordinated by the Registrar’s Office or the institutional FERPA representative.

• Implementation of a Campus Reporting Strategy

OIRAP, MIT, and the Registrar’s Office will lead the development of an inventory of campus reporting and a campus strategy, listing specific department reporting responsibilities.  As BANNER is designed to provide decentralized, operational reporting, accountability at the departmental level must be built into this plan.  Most administrative operational reporting, for example, is provided directly through BANNER; special or more complex reports may require MIT’s or OIRAP’s involvement.

Academic, operational reporting will continue to be handled primarily through the Registrar’s Office, which owns most of the related data.  The addition of an administrative computing specialist in this area (or in MIT) would no doubt help resolve many of the existing reporting issues on campus.

OIRAP will develop and maintain institutional databases designed to support the delivery of on-line Fact Book and management decision-support media.  A new position in OIRAP, Data Manager/Senior Systems Analyst, will support this effort.  In addition, most management ad hoc inquiries and data analysis requests will continue to come directly to Institutional Research.