What is IR Us?

Ever wonder what the Insitutional Research office does at your school? Want to know what IPEDS stands for? How about NSSE? A CIRP survey? How do schools make decisions about their budgets, their curriculum, their student services? It all starts with data, and the IR folks are the ones who fetch.

Glossary Terms for Institutional Research

Below are just a few common terms or words used in the world of Institutional Research and reporting for higher education.  In my adventures, I will be referring back to this list again and again.  I hope it is helpful to you, too!  I will be adding to this list as I go along, but in the meantime, these are those terms in the IPEDS glossary that were a little confusing to me when I first started, and I still need to be reminded of their definitions:
 
  • Carnegie Classification - a coding structure developed to help classify institutions of higher education.
  • Cohort - a specific group of students established for tracking purposes
  • Completer - a student who can be counted as having completed his/her studies at the institution, and upon whom a degree or certificate has been conferred.
  • FTE of students - "full time equivalent" is the value of the combination of full and part time students.  This value is used in many calculations, for example, in determining resources allocated to a division or department.
  • Graduation Rate - Calculated as the total number of completers (see above) within 150% of normal time (4-5 years to complete) divided by the revised adjusted cohort.
  • Imputation - a method for estimating data for non-responses on a survey. 
  • IPEDS - Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System - the data collection and reporting vehicle run by the National Center for Education Statistics to which all higher ed institutions must annually submit data.
  • Non-degree seeking student - A student enrolled in courses for credit but who is not seeing a degree or other certificate or award at the institution.
  • Permanently restricted funds - assets held by the institution that must be held, with only interest income available for use.
  • Retention rate - For for year institutions, percentage of first time degree seeking undergraduate students from the previous fall are again enrolled in the current fall.
  • Student-to-faculty ratio - Ratio of FTE (see above) students to FTE faculty.
  • Title IV Aid - Aid granted to students in the form of work study, grants, and loans.

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