The Analytics Revolution in Higher Education: Big Data, Organizational Learning, and Student Success

Abstract

The Analytics Revolution in Higher Education is an excellent and timely collection of insight from 19 practitioners. The authors describe their approaches to navigating the increasing complex and voluminous amounts of data and analysis asked of staff previously labeled as institutional researchers. Included are topics relevant to decision-making, student success, compliance, predictive analytics, and decision support. The content includes acknowledgment of and strategies for the democratization of data and the distribution of analysis tools across campus. With this grounding, the book provides an important argument for the inclusion of institutional research personnel at the decision-making table. This inclusion is not only to provide accurate and timely data and analysis, but also to bring a data-infused mindset to considerations of the strategic direction of the institution.Chapter 5 explores uncharted space between institutional research and information technology departments. This is particularly salient within the new democratized-data ecosystem. Further sections provide the reader with an opportunity to stay one step ahead on their campus by anticipating needs and embracing new paradigms before the existing are outdated. For example, chapter 10 discusses the field of decision analytics and the role of data governance. The customer-service mindset is expanded in chapter nine with regard to the accountability of the institutional research office within the greater accountability and service of the institution as a whole.The book stands toward the front of the field of scholarship as the content is not only current but forward-looking. It situates itself within the field of institutional research and higher education literature by referencing works from the late 20th century while maintaining a firm and practical focus on 21st-century problems. Within the wider arc of institutional research scholarship, the authors strike a tone of collegial dialogue regarding navigating the next institutional research, predictive analytics, and decision-support terrain. This volume will be useful to readers who find themselves suddenly in the institutional research role at a college or university. The modern expectations on such an employee are discussed alongside frameworks for solutions. Such a reader will gain much value as they embark. This volume will also be useful and insightful to readers who have held the positions of institutional research, effectiveness, assessment, compliance, decision-support, and analytics for some time. Here the colleagues-in-conversation format will support such a reader by reinforcing and supplementing hunches and by presenting new ways of doing what may be familiar work.Value can be derived from this volume for readers on campus beyond the institutional research office. Faculty, provosts, and deans will find insight and frameworks for considering the health and scope of the academic portfolio. Presidents, financial officers, and operating officers will encounter helpful paradigms for navigating the landscape of increasingly accessible data and analytics, and the demands of accountability, accuracy, and creation of meaning from the data. The authors recognize the challenges to institutional research offices in creating new collaborative organizational models as well as navigating across previously partitioned and political landscapes.The book is well written and allows readers to select relevant sections even if not progressing linearly through the volume. In the future, it would be tremendous for the editors and authors to provide an interactive website that includes the authors further discussing valuable ideas, videos of them modeling what they describe using safe, protected data, and a space for web-based interaction between presenters and the participants. Future volumes could include voices from community colleges, private higher education, for-profit education, open educational resources and courses, professional education, and beyond. The already high-level collegiality and use of this insightful work may be enhanced through these potential extensions. In the face of raised expectations on the institutional research office, this book is a welcome help in exceeding those expectations with excellence and with collaborations that serve students.