Blog
April 14, 2025
Holistic Credit Mobility Acceleration Cohort Kicks Off
Takeaways from the Community of Practice
Last month, Ithaka S+R and Complete College America officially launched the holistic credit mobility acceleration cohort. Over the coming year, the 11 state higher education and university systems and institutional consortia participating will convene regularly to develop a unified language around credit mobility, identify best practices, policies, and technologies, and collaborate to move the needle on credit mobility.
April 9, 2025
Integrating AI Literacy into the Curricula
A New Cohort Project Gets Underway
While the technological and commercial landscape remains fluid, and the long-term impacts of AI on teaching and learning remain contested, colleges and universities are ready to shift from reactive to proactive engagement with AI. AI literacy will be a cornerstone of that engagement at many institutions. The idea that students will need to know how to use and think critically about AI is one on which skeptics, agnostics, and advocates can largely agree. A few universities have already launched AI…
April 4, 2025
What Comes Next with Pell Restoration in Postsecondary Education in Prisons
An Interview with Ruth Delaney
As Ithaka S+R continues its work on enhancing data infrastructure for higher education in prison, we are committed to leveraging insights from experts across the field and highlighting key initiatives shaping the landscape. The restoration of Pell Grants for incarcerated learners, enacted through the FAFSA Simplification Act, has created a pressing need to examine program accountability, approval processes, and the role of data in supporting high-quality education. As we look forward to publishing findings from over 40 interviews with…
April 2, 2025
Notes from the Postsecondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) Virtual Showcase
In late February, close to 200 higher education, state agency data leaders, policy analysts, funders, and researchers gathered virtually to explore best practices and new opportunities for connecting postsecondary success data with workforce data. Through a series of presentations and demonstrations, convened by the Postsecondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) Coalition, participants learned about how state agencies and institutions are sharing data—both internally and across states—to improve understanding, advocacy, and decision-making at the nexus of higher education and workforce development.
April 1, 2025
Assessing the Humanities
Announcing a New Project to Better Understand the Structure of Humanities Majors and the Perspective of Department Chairs
Ithaka S+R is excited to announce that we have been engaged by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to conduct research on the state of the humanities in higher education. Our research will be part of a portfolio of commissioned work that will contribute to the Academy’s ongoing efforts to gather comprehensive data on systematic challenges facing humanities departments today. Over the coming year, Ithaka S+R will conduct interviews and focus groups with faculty and administrators from across the…
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March 31, 2025
Launching the 2025 Art Museum Director Survey
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the 2025 Art Museum Director Survey. Fielded originally in 2020 and again in 2022, with funding from the Mellon Foundation and the Kress Foundation, the survey gathers the perspectives of museum directors on topics including leadership and strategy, budget and staffing, visitors and the public, and collections. As the first survey was distributed shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic led museums across the country to close their doors, the findings served…
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March 27, 2025
What Challenges Do Academic Researchers Experience and How Do Campus Data Service Providers Assist Them?
New Report Shares Findings from a Qualitative Study of Researchers at 29 Higher Ed Institutions
In recent years, as funders have increased their expectations for data sharing and machine learning use cases have multiplied, the need to develop an efficient infrastructure of research support services has become a strategic priority for many colleges and universities. To inform university decision making, Ithaka S+R has collaborated over the past two years with 29 US and Canadian institutions to develop strategies for improving the coordination of research data support services offered across different campus offices.
March 25, 2025
Connecting Communities to Care
The Role of Libraries in Mental Health Information Access
The mental health crisis across the United States is widespread, and it shows no signs of abating, with one in five adults experiencing mental illness each year. Among college students, the situation is even more pressing: approximately 60 percent of college students struggle with at least one mental health challenge. The Hope Center recently found that 44 percent of students reported experiencing clinical depression and/or anxiety. Further, 57 percent of students who stopped out without completing…
March 20, 2025
Highlights from SXSW EDU 2025
The Growing Role of AI in Education, Learning Styles, the Value of Higher Education, and Student Belonging Take Center Stage
Earlier this month, I attended the SXSW EDU Conference in Austin, Texas, where I led a panel session about Ithaka S+R’s credit mobility work. The conference featured wide-ranging sessions covering key topics in the K-12, higher education, and education technology sectors. I wanted to highlight a number of sessions that stood out to me, focused on the growing role of artificial intelligence in education, leadership in challenging times, student mental health and learning styles, and building cultures that…
March 19, 2025
How Have Institutions Responded to Transcript Withholding Limitations?
In recent years, institutions have started to move away from the practice of stopping students with unpaid balances from accessing their official transcripts. These transcript holds have been criticized as ineffective tools for debt collection and for their role in the creation of stranded credits, credits students have earned but cannot access. In July 2024, regulations from the Department of Education went into effect that limited this practice. By that time, at least 13 states had already adopted similar…
March 11, 2025
Centralizing Data Services from the Bottom Up
Challenges in navigating the research enterprise Coordinating any type of service or offering across offices and departments is a persistent and pervasive problem at large universities, and research data support services are no exception. As Ruby MacDougall noted in the announcement of Ithaka S+R’s Building Campus Strategies for Data Support Services project, “data support services tend to exist in silos, which can create economic inefficiencies, duplication of services, and programming gaps.” These challenges motivated a multi-unit team from The…
March 10, 2025
University Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in Action
Announcing an Ithaka S+R Webinar
For over two decades, Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) have played an important role in the private sector, serving as centralized hubs for managing open source engagement and strategy. Facilitating the development, contribution, and governance of widely used tools and critical digital infrastructure, the value of OSPOs is well established in corporate contexts. In higher education, however, OSPOs have only recently begun to gain traction. Universities and their employees rely extensively on open source software for…
March 5, 2025
New Lessons for Improving Community College Transfer to Independent Institutions
Updates to the Playbook for Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts
While nearly four out of every five community college students aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree, only 16 percent do so within six years. One oft-overlooked method to increase bachelor’s degree attainment among community college students is to strengthen transfer pathways between two-year and independent (i.e., private, not-for-profit) four-year institutions. Independent institutions often provide flexible degree options, personalized supports, and greater efficiency in credit transfer, all of which can help community college students complete a four-year degree.
March 4, 2025
Announcing a New Report on the Sustainability of Black Literary Organizations
Magnitude and Bond: A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Organizations
In 2023, with funding from the Wallace Foundation, Ithaka S+R began a research collaboration with Cave Canem, a non-profit Black literary arts organization based in Brooklyn, New York. Last week, we published the report resulting from this joint effort: Magnitude and Bond: A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Organizations. For more on the report, we invite you to visit the Cave Canem website.
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March 3, 2025
Announcing the Fourth Cycle of the Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey
The Mellon Foundation and Ithaka S+R Opened the 2025 Cycle of the Survey on March 3rd
Since 2014, Ithaka S+R and the Mellon Foundation have fielded the Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey in collaboration with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). We are excited to announce the continued collaboration through a fourth cycle of the demographic survey of art museum employees. For over a decade, the Staff Demographic Survey has stood as one of the most cited quantitative studies on demographics within North American art museums. By measuring…
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February 28, 2025
Public and Academic Libraries Supporting College Readiness
How are students supposed to know where to start when applying to college? Once they arrive, how do they continue navigating complex institutional systems and advocating for themselves? For many students—especially first-generation students, English language learners, and adult learners—higher education can feel like an overwhelming maze of unfamiliar terminology, decentralized services, and bureaucratic roadblocks. Without clear guidance, students may struggle to access the support they need, impacting their ability to enroll, persist, and succeed in college. Join us for…
February 27, 2025
National Holistic Credit Mobility Acceleration Cohort
Announcing 11 Members
In collaboration with Complete College America, we’re excited to announce the selection of 11 distinguished higher education organizations for the Holistic Credit Mobility Acceleration Cohort. This initiative aims to enhance credential completion rates by promoting flexible and equitable credit mobility pathways for postsecondary students across the country. The cohort members’ efforts will build upon the best practices of early leaders in the field, as outlined in Credit Mobility Strategies in Action, a case study research report we published…
February 14, 2025
Supporting First-Year Success
Insights from the Kessler Scholars Program
The first year of college can be an exciting but difficult transition period for many students, marked by new academic demands, administrative processes, and social experiences. Many first-year students experience feelings of imposter syndrome, isolation, and financial strain and have difficulty balancing coursework with other responsibilities, all of which can contribute to attrition. These challenges are even more pronounced for students from underrepresented backgrounds. First-generation students, in particular, face additional obstacles compared to their peers with college-educated parents. They often…
February 11, 2025
Update: E-Book Publishing Research Study
In May 2024, we announced a new project to study the costs and benefits of emerging models in the monographs publishing landscape. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the study looks to analyze the market fit of various models within the academic e-book sector to understand how these models are functioning for libraries and authors. As part of this project we are interviewing publishers and content aggregators as well as librarians. In our initial conversations with the first group, we…
February 10, 2025
Defining and Implementing AI Literacy
Announcing a New Cohort Project
Defining and implementing AI literacy is complicated by rapidly evolving technologies and the difficulty of foreseeing the magnitude and variety of AI’s effects on teaching and learning, career readiness, and civic life. Creating institutionally specific frameworks for AI literacy and building the programming and resources necessary to integrate it into undergraduate education will require contributions from across the university. Libraries are well positioned to be campus and even national leaders in these efforts.