Three and half years ago, the Association was established with the main purpose to revitalize the US higher education.  On August 30, 2016, AAEA reached another milestone with more than 200K visitors.  This shows two main points.  (1). The American public has the confidence on AAEA’s published research results; (2). Many are able to get the strategic information out of AAEA’s research work, free of charge.

To change the mindset in managing higher education institutions to cope with fundamental changes in the ultra competitive environment where they are operating is not always easy.  However, we are glad to see that players in the industry have realized what the Association has tried to convey and hypothesized in the past.

The following are the real changes that we have seen after AAEA was established:

1. The use of education or IRI analytics which never been heard before is becoming more popular. It has become a norm for colleges to adopt this new paradigm after it was introduced for the first time at North Carolina Community College System Annual Meetings in Raleigh, NC on October 7, 2012 and at 2012 South Central SAS Users Group Annual Conference in Houston, TX.
2. Some schools have changed their Institutional Research & Assessment name to something that has the word “analytics”. For example, Office of Institutional Research and Analytics.
3. The States start to apply the Performance Based Funding System to award the annual budget among state colleges.
4. More inappropriate practices have been revealed in recent years.
5. The regulator starts tightening its grips on both academic and financial metrics on Title IV institutions for more regulations are introduced in the past years.
6. The regulator is paying more attention on for-profit higher education institutions’ business model.
7. US higher education is the most discussed issue in the society.
8. In 2015, the regulator started to publish the list of financially trouble US colleges.
9. The regulator seems to pay more attention to US higher education.
10. The accrediting agencies start improving their roles, which may not have been seen before.

After its establishment, there are many more positive impacts that the Association has contributed to the industry and is able to add to the above list.  While this partial list shows that our mission is accomplished, there are many more tasks that AAEA will continue to work on in the future.

By now US higher education institutions that participated in the 2016 NSSE survey may have received their results.  This note serves as a friendly reminder for them to take an extra caution when reading the reports.  Needless to say that taking the mathematical average or statistical mean on categorical data from the stand point of education/IRI or data analytics may not be exactly appropriate.  A couple of years ago, the Association has raised this issue.

Today we just learned that more US colleges have dropped or plan to erase a certain part of the assessment tests as part of the admissions requirements such as ACT/SAT subject test or essay scores.  Needless to say that statistical analyses have shown that some of these dropped assessment components have significant effects on both student’s retention and graduation.  Perhaps IRI analytics has been applied on institutional past evidence that has shown otherwise and in-depth studies have been done at those colleges to support such admissions policy changes.  Dropping them will surely help to increase the institutions’ enrollment which in turns will increase revenue generated from tuition.  While this policy sounds great, it may potentially create another problem on both retention and graduation rate.  These two important metrics are usually used in the state performance based funding.  Lowering the admissions standards, will increase tuition revenue only in the short-run.  However, in the long-run it potentially will reduce money received from the state, especially in the state where performance based funding has been applied to make award decisions.  The institutions will be able to keep both its retention and graduation rate unchanged or even better after the policy got implemented by lowering their courses passing requirements.  In other words, reducing the admissions standards will force the instructors to lower their courses standard as well.  Making the college admissions less rigorous only shows a clear signal of decreasing student enrollment across the US.  It maybe a beginning of self-destruction toward the US higher ed system.

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.

There has been a lot of talk in the campaign trails on how the candidate will deal with the gigantic $1.3 trillion student loans debt.  This indicates finally this country realizes that there is something wrong with the US higher education despite some say otherwise.  Waiting until 2016 to address such important issues show:

1. For some people the student loans is not really important. It surfaces as a campaign rhetoric may be just to get student loans borrowers’ votes.
2. The regulator often adopts a reactive policy instead of proactive or even “do nothing policy”.
3. Most players in the past have pretended that the country higher education system is not broken.
4. Some players have taken advantages because the system in fact is badly broken.
5. Past administrators have lack of “will” to straight things down, and chose to quit rather than to fight all the way through.
6. The next administration needs to appoint a person-in-chief that has the bone to say what is wrong and take real actions to fix things regardless of the challenges from many sides.
7. Appoint a person-in-chief that has the integrity, courage and ability to focus on the interest of Uncle Sam’s and not others.
8. The next administration needs to be honest to the people instead to the groups of people who happen to be his or her supporters in the campaign trail.
9. A “big name school” does not always indicate or a credible signal that the person-in-chief for the job has the quality as mentioned in point 5, 6 and 7.
10. Empty promises or lies will cause more damages than good.

The remaining questions are “Can Uncle Sam find the person-in-chief with such qualities”? Or “will the next administrator be able to carry out what has been promised in the campaign trails”? Or will it be just another empty promise as any politician will do”?

Recently, we just learned that the DOE is considering to drop the ACICS from the accreditation business.  The recommendation confirmed what the Association has hypothesized many years ago about the acute problems associated with one of the quality works by the US accreditation agencies.  Though the news on ACICS comes a bit too late, it is better than never.  Applying the Waste Function Paradigm on 11 years published data, the Association has calculated the proxy of wasteful resources on other US regional accrediting agencies (note that only DOE has the exact numbers).  The calculation is based on nominal (Dollar) value and on all Carnegie classification institutions.  That said, potentially there will be a double counting.  Perhaps, it is time for the regulator to take proactive actions instead of reactive to protect the tax payers’ money, the students’ and their family precious resources from the predators.

It seems that the American society does not to have much choices when dealing with cheating conducted by selected segments in the higher education industry.  The society completely depends on the regulator’s willingness to take appropriate actions toward the lemons.  Though, it has been identified by many who they are, it takes the regulator a tremendous amount of time to deal with the problems.  The business model of some of the organizations do not gear toward helping the students, but to find ways to extract the public money which often left the students in debts which some of them have to carry the burdens for the rest of their life.  It is stunning how ignorance this country has been toward students being cheated from left and right.  Only one law maker has consistently voiced the concern and try to change the course!  Where are the rests? Making the matter worst, the accrediting agencies that supposed to keep players in the line, found to be part of the problems.  Who else should we trust?

On December 14th, 2015, the Association has written and published an article i.e., ESCC. In this article the importance of checking financial accountability was stressed. Today we again learned why such an accountability is urgently needed. One problem after another found in the industry. While the regulator tries to deal with academic accountability, and now it has to deal with another bigger problem related to the institutions’ financial integrity, fraud and cheating. Corinthian and American Career Institute, or ACI are just two cases that show the tip of the iceberg. It did not just happen only at for-profit organizations. There are many more out there. As it is currently, the regulator just do not have enough man-power to conduct the financial accountability jobs on more than 6000 organizations. The fact of the matter was that it, the regulator just started to establish a unit within its organization to conduct such efforts starting in February, 2016 after the Association again and again urged it to do so.

On April 22, 2016, Democratic Policy and Communications Committee (DPCC), known before as DPC, Democratic Policy Committee wrote a letter to DOE Secretary to take more firm measures to various accrediting agencies.  We all may know the infamous case on the Corinthian College, a for-profit education institution.  When it collapsed, it was an accredited higher education institution in the US.  One may ask the question how could this thing happen?  An accredited institution went bankrupt without any prior warning from the accrediting agencies that supposedly to protect the interests of the American society?  The Association has written an article on July 03, 2015 to raise the issue.  Though a bit late, this is one of the reasons that motivates the Senate Democrats to write the letter to the DOE Secretary. We, at the Association are glad that finally the US lawmakers do something and other institution confirmed the Association’s observation on May 5th, 2016.  There are a couple things that one can learn from this case:

1. All involved parties are reactive instead of proactive.
2. Colleges’ accreditors may not have done their job optimally.
3. No consequences in place for a sub-par quality work.  Therefore, there should be an accreditor agency or agencies to conduct compliance tests on all current accrediting agencies’ work.
4. Accreditation policies, and processes and (using Mr. Gray’s words, the accrediting agencies, have they own methods and criteria) may have been out-dated and they need to be reevaluated, rewritten and to be streamlined with the American society’s concerns.