Three years ago the Association has published many articles in its blog related to IRI analytics or Data Scientist.  Today we learned the shortages of such expertise are real in the US.  How this new development will affect the Institutional Research & Students Learning Outcomes and Assessment profession?  It is very obvious.  When the Association initiates to use the term education analytics or IRI analytics, many traditionalists think that was an absurd idea which will never take off the ground.

Currently the facts show that many colleges and universities and other higher ed institutions in the US have renamed their IR department to something with analytics word attached to it, i.e., Office of Institutional Analytics instead of traditional “Office of Institutional Research and Assessment”.  For example, the University of New Mexico renamed its IR office as “Office of Institutional Analytics”, while the University of North Texas relabeled its IR department as the “Office of Data, Analytics, & Institutional Research”.  Moreover, Borough of Manhattan Community College has replaced it traditional name to “Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics”.  The list can go more than only three institutions and it will get longer as time passes.

One important note that the Association would like to share is that changing the name is a good sign, and the first step toward embracing the IRI Analytics paradigm.  However, the change of the name needs to be followed by changes in the culture, mentality and improve the actors’ skills sets. Enough training to equip the personnel with the IRI expertise., for example from “something point and click” to the ability of writing SAS codes. SAS runs parallel with one’s understanding about statistics and the concepts about data types.  This is exactly what Microsoft tries partially to fill the gap by offering the newly launched programs.

There are four main obstacles for the US Higher Education industry to have enough personnel to deal with this new reality of which the AAEA has successfully predicted is going to occur more than three years ago.  The administrators may not get used to use data in the decision making process. Second, recent leaderships who are making the hiring decision are not an expert in the analytics by training.  Third, majority of the current IR professionals (analyst, associate and such) may have limited IRI analytics skills as well for they are the products of the past.  Lastly, US colleges have to compete with the manufacturing, financial or health industry and others for such a talent.  While associates or analysts are paid around $40K-50K or lower to carry out the education analytics jobs, it is surely more difficult to get well-rounded professionals because other industries, on average are paying at least 30 to 50 percent more than what the educational institutions are currently willing to pay.  As results, higher ed institutions will continuously rely to outside consultants.  However, consultants are not magicians who can fix long-run institutional challenges over night.  In the near future, US colleges may start hijacking IRI experts from other higher ed institutions.