Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

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Here's your SCUP Link to "2010 Institutional Research Conference Roundup"

Inside Higher Ed's Doug Lederman reports out from the early days of the 2010 annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR). This report is about student retention and student retention rates. One interesting study from, Washtenaw Community College (MI), found that students transferring to 4-year schools did well, but that those who did best had been at the community college for shorter periods of time. We think Lederman's introduction nicely portrays institutional researchers:

Institutional researchers are higher education's version of a utility infielder. That doesn't mean they lack expertise: They specialize in bringing data to bear on issues and problems, and explaining and interpreting those data to campus constituents who often come at the information from widely varying viewpoints. Their versatility comes, though, in the wide range of subjects they touch and of decisions over which they have some influence.

Given that eclectic role, the annual forum of the Association for Institutional Research typically covers a plethora of topics, and this year's meeting, the organization's 50th, is no exception. But it is also true that examining the forum's agenda usually offers a sense of which issues are keeping institutional leaders up at night, since those are often the topics that presidents and provosts and other campus officials have asked their data gurus to dive into.

 

The "Electronic AIR" is the single oldest, still-publishing email newsletter on the Internet. It's not just the oldest in higher education or among associations, it is the oldest period. It's been publishing regularly since October of 1987. SCUP's own "SCUP Email News" is the second oldest email newsletter on the Internet, having begun publishing one month later in November of 1987. It's no coincidence that the two began at about the same time, because the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) and SCUP share a lot of interests, and also a lot of interesting people. E-AIR is monthly, so it won't add tremendously to your inbox if you subscribe to it, which we recommend. Among items in the current issue are a Practitioner Profile of Gordon Mills, director of institutional research at the University of South Alabama; Technical Tips From the Field, this about some of the more sophisticated ways you can Google search; and the ever-amusing annual E-AIR Limerick Contest.