Transcript The role of institutional research in positioning higher education institutions - practices in CEE countries

27th Annual EAIR Forum 2015
Krems, Austria
31 August 2015
The role of institutional research in
positioning higher education institutions –
practices in CEE countries
Manja Klemenčič
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Harvard University
Institutional positioning in higher
education
Institutional positioning in higher education as “the process through which HEIs
locate themselves in specific niches within the higher education system and these
niches (sets of relations) are expected to positively contribute to institutional
functioning and performance” (Fumasoli and Huisman 2013)
Imperatives towards institutional positioning: from market (enhanced
competition for scares resources) and state (responding to changing societal
needs)
Capabilities for institutional positioning: real opportunities and positive freedoms
of institutions (i.e. their decision-makers) to critically shape their responsiveness
to higher education environment for the purposes of institutional survival and
improved functioning - > deliberate strategic action embedded in heavily
institutionalized higher education system and shaped by strategic resources (such
as status and prestige)
The role of institutional research in
deliberate institutional positioning
Institutional research to feed data and analyses into decision processes towards
deliberate positioning is indispensable.
Institutional research most often defined as “research conducted within an
institution of higher education to provide information which supports institutional
planning, policy formation and decision making” (Saupe 1990).
The kind of information that is needed for strategic positioning is especially
contextual intelligence (if we take Terenzini’s (1993) three tiers: technical and
analytical – tier 1; issues intelligence – tier 2, and contextual intelligence – tier 3).
Institutional research in CEE
The practices of collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing institutional data
generally serve two major purposes:
- to fulfill mandatory reporting requirements and assessment,
- to support university decision-making and planning.
Emphasis of institutional research remains on the reporting since the capacity
for institutional research is in most universities still fairly limited:
- there are a few institutional researchers employed
- institutional researchers tend to work with centralized, yet non-integrated
information systems
Major role of the state in prompting and crucially shaping institutional change in
university practice in IR: change in the type and extent of institutional micro data
that is requested from regulatory and funding bodies -> exposing the weaknesses
in the existing national systems of data collection and analyses.
Tensions in how institutional research is
conceived to support institutional positioning
decisions
How to develop culture of institutional research that will enable and
nurture involvement of students and staff with institutional research
and university quality improvement?
How to ensure that platforms of institutional research and decision support
systems strengthen student and staff agency to act freely, innovate
internally and engage externally?
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Your experience, your comments?
Thank you!
[email protected]
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