It’s probably a bit of a reach to claim that the Institutional Effectiveness and Mission Fulfillment report (begrudgingly called the IEMF) is the cutting edge of data reporting, but it is true that this annual report is something that a lot of people work pretty hard on for several months at the end of each academic year. Unlike the college’s dashboard – a single page of data points that is supposed to cut the quantitative quick, the IEMF is a motherload of data and a treasure trove of information about Augustana College.
In past years we have posted the IEMF on the Institutional Research web page and hoped that people would look at it because, you know . . . nerd click-bait! Not since the first year that we produced this report have we hosted a public gathering to invite comment from anyone who might have an observation about the data and how it is conveyed. One thing I will not soon forget from that meeting was the degree to which data becomes political as soon as it becomes public, and therefore how important it is to convey precisely and anticipate how data presentations might be interpreted from different points of view.
With that in mind, I want to share with you the 2016 version of the IEMF. It is organized into nine sections that each cover different aspects of what and how we do what we do. For example, in the section titled Persistence, Graduation, and Attrition (p. 1) you might be interested in the distribution of reasons that students give for withdrawing and how those reasons might have changed over the last three years. Or, in the section titled Our Practices (p. 20) you might be interested in the rising costs to recruit a single student over the last three years. There are a lot of tidbits throughout the document that provide a glimpse into Augustana College – areas of strength, opportunities for growth, and how we compare to similar liberal liberal arts colleges around the country.
Click on the link below and swim in a river of data to your heart’s content.
Certainly, the IEMF isn’t a perfect snapshot. Even though it has improved considerably from it’s first iteration several years ago, there are plenty of places where we wish our data were a little better or a little more precisely able to show who we are and what we do. Most importantly, this document isn’t intended to be a braggart’s bible. On the contrary, the IEMF is designed to be an honest presentation of Augustana College and of us. We aren’t perfect. And we know that. But we are trying to be as good as we can be with the resources we have. And in more than a few instances, we are doing pretty well.
Before I forget, a special and sincere “thank you” goes out to everyone who played a role in hunting down this data and putting the document together: Kimberly Dyer, Keri Rursch, Cindy Schroeder, Quan Vi, Erin Digney, Angie Williams, Katey Bignall, Kelly Hall, Randy Roy, Lisa Sears, Matt Walsh, Sheri Curran, Robert Scott, Jeff Thompson, Dom Sullivan, Katrina Friedrich, Bonnie Hewitt, Scott Dean, Shawn Beattie, and Kent Barnds.
So have a look. If you have any questions or critiques or suggestions, please send them to me. I’m genuinely looking for ways to improve this document.
For starters . . . anyone got any catchy ideas for a better name?
Make it a good day,
Mark