Archive
Research Report
March 31, 2025
Terrain Leveling
Design Strategies for Improving Higher Education in Prisons
Tommaso Bardelli, Sam Johnson, Tammy Ortiz, Elizabeth Austin, Laura Brown, Catharine Bond Hill, Sindy Lopez, Molly McGowan, Amy Mielke, Ess Pokornowski
A growing body of research documents the barriers faced by incarcerated students—such as limited access to technology and conflicts with correctional staff—but far less attention has been paid to the role of the built environment in shaping educational experiences. This project, led by Ennead Lab and Ithaka S+R, examines how spatial, architecture, and design features impact learning inside prisons. It draws on qualitative interviews and site visits to advance both research findings and a portfolio of design interventions.
Research Report
March 27, 2025
Researcher Challenges and Experiences with Data Services
While there is general consensus that institutions should provide a coordinated research data services support infrastructure to their researchers, determining the most effective way to do this has proven more difficult, especially in light of the fast-paced technological changes that have precipitated new forms of research collaborations, methodologies, and discoveries. In this report, we share findings from interviews with researchers that provide information about their data management needs and their current level of engagement with campus data services.
Research Report
March 19, 2025
Meeting the Climate Emergency
University Information Infrastructure for Researching Wicked Problems
Contemporary societies face a range of urgent threats to the well-being of individuals, nations, and the natural world. These high stakes “wicked problems,” as Don Waters calls them in this report, present challenges that are simultaneously scientific, technological, social, and creative. They require expertise from across the disciplines to understand, and equally complex public and political engagement, to overcome. Waters makes the case that America’s research universities are exceptionally well-equipped to address these wicked problems.
Research Report
March 19, 2025
Balancing Access and Accountability
Assessing the Implications of the New Federal Transcript-Hold Regulation for Higher Education - Part 3
This report is the third in a three-part series examining how institutions of higher education have responded to state and federal policies limiting the use of transcript holds for unpaid balances, produced in partnership between Ithaka S+R and AACRAO. The prior reports explored the anticipated and actual impacts of the July 2024 federal regulation limiting transcript holds on higher education institutions in states that did not have existing laws related to the practice.
Playbook
March 5, 2025
Playbook for Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts
How to Design and Implement Statewide Pathways from Community Colleges to Independent Colleges
One way to achieve bachelor's degree attainment for community college transfer students at scale is through state- and region-level initiatives dedicated to supporting transfer from community colleges to independent colleges and universities. The Teagle Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations’ Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts initiative aimed to create such pathways. This playbook draws on the experiences of grantees building pathways in 14 states.
Research Report
February 26, 2025
Magnitude and Bond
A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Organizations
Black literary arts organizations nurture literary talent, establish living literary canons, and generate thriving communities of artists and readers, cultivating Black spaces for sharing the vulnerable processes necessary to invent new ways of saying important things. This report, which explores the sustainability of Black literary arts organizations, grew out of a research process undertaken through a collaboration between Cave Canem and Ithaka S+R. It explores the characteristics of Black literary arts organizations and the adaptive strategies they employ.
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Research Report
January 22, 2025
Charting the Course
Case Studies in OER Sustainability
Over the past several years, OERs have gained significant traction across higher education, driven by a combination of grassroots campus efforts and state agencies of higher education or system-wide initiatives. The rationale behind these efforts has been clear: to alleviate the financial burden on students by reducing the cost of course materials. But OERs offer other advantages as well, serving as a catalyst for instructional innovation and helping to create a more inclusive learning environment.
Research Report
January 13, 2025
Preserving Their Stories
Making (and Sharing) Art Under Mass Incarceration
While a handful of initiatives have recently begun to systematically collect materials created by people impacted by incarceration, anecdotal evidence suggests that most incarcerated artists and writers entrust their work to grassroots and volunteer-led organizations. Thus, if we are to begin to address archival silences around people who have experienced incarceration, it will be critical to understand the role community organizations can play in creating more inclusive and holistic collections and supporting humanistic inquiry.
Research Report
December 19, 2024
Tailored Support for First-Year, First-Generation College Students
Findings from an Evaluation of the Kessler Scholars Program
Established and emerging Kessler Scholars Programs at 16 colleges and universities are embedded in and supported by the Kessler Scholars Collaborative, a nationwide network that guides program development and implementation, facilitates practice sharing across institutions, and provides students with opportunities to connect with other first-generation scholars across the country. Ithaka S+R’s multi-year mixed-methods evaluation aims to assess the long-term relationship between program participation and students’ college experiences and psychosocial and academic outcomes.
Playbook
December 9, 2024
Technology Implementation for Higher Education in Prison
A Student-Centered Playbook for Planning, Preparing, and Assessing Implementation Readiness
As both the owner and operator of correctional facilities and the official oversight entity for higher education in prison programming, it is up to departments of correction to determine what technology to make available for education on the inside. However, there are very few resources designed to help correctional leaders determine what technologies are available, how they might benefit students in their facilities, and what drawbacks the new technology might pose.
Research Report
November 7, 2024
Fostering College Fluency
Results from a National Survey of Community College Library and Campus Partners
To better understand the current landscape of college fluency, and the challenges faced by institutions, Ithaka S+R and the Borough of Manhattan Community College, with support from IMLS, fielded a national survey to gather insights from administrators, librarians, and faculty and staff from academic and student affairs departments across community colleges in the US. This survey aimed to explore the perceptions of college fluency and evaluate the effectiveness of existing support and resource referrals.
Research Report
October 30, 2024
A Third Transformation?
Generative AI and Scholarly Publishing
For this report, we interviewed leaders in stakeholder communities about the potential impact of generative AI on scholarly publishing . The consensus among the individuals with whom we spoke is that generative AI will enable efficiency gains across the publication process. Writing, reviewing, editing, and discovery will all become easier and faster. Both scholarly publishing and scientific discovery in turn will likely accelerate. From that shared premise, two distinct categories of change emerged from our interviews.
Research Report
October 17, 2024
Adoption of Generative AI by Academic Biomedical Researchers
Understanding how biomedical researchers are making use of generative AI is critical to informed decision making about how to support ethical adoption of the technology and assessing the risks and opportunities it presents to the research enterprise. However, most studies of the use of generative AI by academic researchers have cast a wide net rather than focusing on adoption in specific disciplines or domains. To this end, we conducted a survey of biomedical researchers.
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Research Report
October 16, 2024
Beyond Standards
A Critical Examination of the Relationship between NACIQI and Accreditors
The report begins with a primer on the system of higher education quality assurance as it currently exists to establish the necessary context for a closer focus on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) and its relationships with accreditation organizations. The contextual overview will include a brief explanation of the three members of the quality assurance triad (state recognition boards, accreditors, and the Department of Education) followed by a deeper dive into NACIQI.
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Research Report
October 7, 2024
Uneven Terrain
Learning Spaces in Higher Education in Prison
How can prison education programs fulfill their obligation to provide their students with an educational experience that is as close as possible to the one of students on main campuses? Thus far, our research into equitable access has focused largely on instructional delivery and practices, and technological access and use. This report broadens our interrogation of that central question by exploring the role of space, architecture, and design in the context of higher education in prison.
Research Report
September 30, 2024
Exploring the Landscape of College and Community Reentry Partnerships
Now that federal Pell Grant funding has been reinstated for learners who are incarcerated, the field is in flux. Higher education in prison programs are adapting and developing their practices to meet new policy and regulation needs. Two major facets of the revised regulations for Pell funding are particularly critical for college in prison programs, namely the requirement to track and report student data, and the obligation to document how they or their partner organizations provide reentry services.
Research Report
August 22, 2024
US Instructor Survey 2024
Findings from a National Survey
As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, the landscape of higher education continues to evolve. Ithaka S+R's 2024 US Instructor Survey sheds light on how college instructors are adapting, with a renewed focus on diverse teaching and learning modalities. Adapted from the US Faculty Survey we have fielded regularly since 2000, this iteration offers a valuable snapshot of the shifting dynamics in college teaching.
Research Report
August 1, 2024
Governance and Business Models for Collaborative Collection Development
To be effective, library collaborations focused on collection development need to be responsive to the changing landscape of scholarly resources as well as the evolving nature of research, teaching, and learning. The purpose of this report is to further increase our understanding of the governance and business characteristics of collaborative collection development initiatives, and how the attributes of different business models can affect the outcomes of collaborations.
Research Report
July 25, 2024
Perceptions of Academic Freedom in Teaching
Findings from a National Survey of Instructors
Since 2021, people across the political spectrum have become preoccupied with questions of free speech and censorship on college campuses, and state legislators have driven the proliferation of new policies that limit spending and programming related to DEI and alter academic autonomy or shared governance arrangements. Against this backdrop, we included a short block of questions centered on academic freedom in a national survey of US instructors at four-year colleges and universities.
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Research Report
July 16, 2024
Exploring Basic Needs Support Across Public and Community College Libraries
Opportunities for Collaboration
There are many intersections between public and community college libraries, both in the populations they serve and their functions within their local communities. Both types of libraries play a crucial role in supporting the diverse needs of their communities, serving as hubs for education, information, and essential services. Maximizing partnerships between public and community college libraries therefore presents a significant opportunity.