Teams from 29 member colleges and universities took part in CIC’s fifth Data and Decisions Workshop, the largest yet. In all, 97 people attended the Hartford, Connecticut event held April 20–22, 2006. The Data and Decisions Workshops are cosponsored by CIC and the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) with funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center on Education Statistics (NCES).

The workshops help participants make better use of institutional and comparative data to enhance strategic planning and decision-making. The three- and four-person teams include a staff member responsible for institutional research, along with key institutional decision-makers such as presidents and chief academic, financial, enrollment management, and student affairs officers. Workshop topics include performance indicators, comparison groups, strategic planning, operational issues, assessment, action plans, and publicly available national data sources.

Participants at the April workshop received hands-on training on the use of NCES’s online Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which includes extensive data on all U.S. higher education institutions. CIC Director of Research Hal Hartley also introduced participants to CIC’s comparative data resources, the Key Indicators Tool (KIT), a pilot version of the Financial Indicators Tool (FIT), and the wealth of data on CIC’s Making the Case website (see related story).

Each institutional team developed a project during the workshop that they would implement upon their return to campus. The teams made brief presentations of their projects; many of them focused on recruitment and retention of students and utilization of institutional resources.

The next Data and Decisions Workshop will be held October 5–7, 2006 in St. Louis. Information and application materials are available here. The deadline for institutional teams to apply is June 30, 2006.