TMCC Institutional Research Strategic Plan (2018-2022)

7 Environmental Scan The State of Data Affairs at TMCC: The Institutional Research Office is the primary analytical arm of the college and is involved in enrollment analytics, compliance reporting, and supporting data-driven decision-making to improve institutional effectiveness. The Admissions and Records Office is the primary data custodian on campus and is responsible for input and upkeep of student records and other data residing in PeopleSoft. A&R and IR are tasked with working in close collaboration and coordination specifically: A&R is the gatekeeper of the data input and ensuring data integrity, which allows IR to mine the data accurately and effectively for analysis. The ability of TMCC’s Institutional Research Office to fulfill its mission and reach its goals is impacted by the direction of a number of internal factors and national trends.  Transition to online : The TMCC IR office must change to meet the needs of an increasingly online-savvy constituent base. Availability of online institutional data has become imperative and is expected by students, faculty, and staff alike. The usefulness of printed data (the TMCC Fact Book, and factsheets) is diminishing, however the expectation that this information is still readily available is increasing. The conversion of our data platform to fully online has begun and should be complete within the year.  Benchmarking : Use of national data sets and the practice of benchmarking have become necessary in higher education. We must ask the questions “Howwell are we doing compared to others?” and “How can we adapt what they are doing, to our institution?” We are in an era where data-informed decision making is imperative, especially benchmarking performance information. The TMCC IR office must step up to support such strategic thinking and change. We have begun to prioritize benchmarking efforts in this office, but we must expand and grow this effort annually.  Train data users : The dominant model of the higher education IR office in the past was based on being support staff for a small set of high-level decision makers. This narrow view is no longer functional given the increasingly data-literate constituents we serve. It is imperative that we embrace the future role of IR which suggests we should be in the business of training all interested stakeholders in data use and dissemination, allowing others a broader role in the decision-making process.  Stronger Together : Institutional data gathered in the IR Office, including results of benchmarking efforts, need to be adapted to sound bites for our end user’s consumption. The IR Office must begin working more closely with the Marketing Office to insure the dissemination of institutional data in the form of easily digestible infographic materials. A series of infographic materials has been planned and is currently in development.