Office of Institutional Research

The Office of Institutional Research (OIR) has a broad range of responsibilities. The office collects, analyzes and reports about all facets of Columbia College both within the college community and to external entities, including states and the federal government.

External Responsibilities

OIR is responsible for providing Columbia College data for mandatory external reporting (federal and state), military, accrediting agencies, auditing agencies, grants, college search websites, media, associations and publications. This includes, but is not limited to, surveys for the mandatory federal Integrated Post Secondary Educational Data System (IPEDS), Higher Learning Commission (HLC), state higher education departments, College Board, Peterson's, Princeton Review, CUPA-HR, American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and Open Doors. OIR responds to more than 90 external requests each year.

OIR also maintains public information regarding Outcome Measures, Student Diversity and Athletics as required by law. This information is available to prospective students, students and parents and can be found here:

Internal Responsibilities

OIR creates, maintains, updates and distributes internal reports needed by the college to support a data-driven environment. OIR also conducts surveys within the college as well as facilitates surveys that are conducted by external entities such as Noel Levitz and NSSE. Detailed data analysis on the results of both internal and external surveys is available upon request.

In addition, OIR maintains dashboards and on-demand reports for the college community that give summative data on a number of data points. These are accessible by all employees.

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