Archive
Research Report
September 9, 2021
Library Strategy and Collaboration Across the College Ecosystem
Results from a National Survey of Community College Library Directors
How can the library be best positioned to continue enabling student and institutional success? The Community College Academic and Student Support Ecosystem research initiative seeks to examine how student-facing service departments—including academic libraries—are organized, funded, and staffed at community and technical colleges across the country. In February 2021, we surveyed 321 community college library directors to provide the community with a snapshot of current service provision, leadership perspectives on the impact of COVID-19, and challenges faced in making decisions and…
Research Report
August 30, 2021
Public College and University Consolidations and the Implications for Equity
Martin Kurzweil, Melody Andrews, Catharine Bond Hill, Sosanya Jones, Jane Radecki, Roger C. Schonfeld
Across American higher education, institutional consolidations are on the rise. In particular, multiple state systems have proposed or completed mergers of regional universities and/or community colleges with the stated goal of increasing efficiency. The conditions prompting these consolidations have been mounting for years—among them a long-term downward trend in state support for higher education and demographic shifts away from traditional-aged college students, especially in rural areas where numerous public institutions are located. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting recession…
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Research Report
August 17, 2021
Stranded Credits: A Matter of Equity
Usually when student debt is discussed and examined, the focus is on federal and private loans; however there are other more insidious forms of student debt that affect thousands of students each year and impact their ability to matriculate, transfer, qualify for scholarships and even qualify for job opportunities. Stranded credits is a phenomenon where students earn academic credits but cannot access them due to an unpaid balance with a previously attended institution that is holding their transcript as collateral.
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Research Report
August 3, 2021
Breaking Down Barriers
The Impact of State Authorization Reciprocity on Online Enrollment
State authorization, or the approval by a given state for a college to operate within its jurisdiction, is an important part of the regulatory triad. The triad is the three-pronged oversight of higher education that includes the federal government, accrediting bodies, and state governments. State authorization has become more complicated with the rapid expansion of online education that is blurring state geographic boundaries. Colleges seeking to enroll students from numerous states in online programs must obtain authorization in each of…
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Research Report
June 29, 2021
American Talent Initiative 2021
Third Annual Progress Report
Martin Kurzweil, Tania LaViolet, Elizabeth Davidson Pisacreta, Adam Rabinowitz, Emily Schwartz, Joshua Wyner
The American Talent Initiative (ATI) brings together a coalition of four-year colleges and universities in pursuit of a common goal: enrolling, supporting, and graduating 50,000 additional lower-income students by 2025 at the colleges and universities that consistently graduate at least 70 percent of their students in six years. ATI’s third annual progress report provides a snapshot of progress—and setbacks. It comes at a time when a global pandemic has deepened inequality, and a national uprising against systemic racism has sharpened…
Research Report
June 24, 2021
MAAPS Advising Experiment
Evaluation Findings after Four Years
Acknowledgements This project is generously funded by a US Department of Education First in the World validation grant,[1] with additional support from Arnold Ventures. We thank the project principal investigator, Dr. Timothy Renick of Georgia State University, for inviting Ithaka S+R to serve as its independent evaluator and for being an invaluable thought and project partner. We would like to acknowledge the key role of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA), which inspired the project by…
Research Report
June 22, 2021
What’s the Big Deal?
How Researchers Are Navigating Changes to Journal Access
The dominant mode by which research libraries have provided maximum journal access as cheaply as possible—subscription bundles or “Big Deals”—is giving way to new approaches. This transition is taking place through a combination of negotiations, activism, business modeling, user needs research, and decision support, among other factors. To support these processes, Ithaka S+R partnered with 11 academic libraries to understand researcher perceptions to help inform their ongoing strategic decision making about Big Deal journal subscriptions.
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Research Report
April 28, 2021
Moving the Needle on College Student Basic Needs
National Community College Provost Perspectives
For many years, higher education data collection and funding efforts have focused on student success metrics like enrollment, graduation, retention, and course completion rates. At the same time, higher education leaders have become increasingly aware—in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic—of the vast array of challenges that college students face outside of the classroom that prevent them from fully succeeding. To shed light on the challenges and opportunities associated with the collection and prioritization of a broader set of student…
Research Report
March 23, 2021
Teaching with Primary Sources
Looking at the Support Needs of Instructors
Kurtis Tanaka, Daniel Abosso, Krystal Appiah, Katie Atkins, Peter Barr, Arantza Barrutia-Wood, Shatha Baydoun, Catherine Bazela, Cara Bertram, Colleen Boff, Steve Borrelli, Jay-Marie Bravent, Sarah Brennan, Tina Budzise-Weaver, Margaret Burri, Liz Cheney, Cait Coker, Heather Cole, Lisa Conathan, Emily Cook, Danielle Miriam Cooper, Joshua Dacey, J. Gordon Daines III, Diana Dill, Carrie Donovan, Lori DuBois, Lisa Duncan, Sarah Evelyn, Mary Feeney, Patricia Figueroa, Rebecca Friedman, Myranda Fuentes, Danielle Gabbard, Eleonora Gandolfi, Chloe Gerson, Kelly Godfrey, Melissa Grafe, Brenda Gunn, Jeanann Haas, Terese Heidenwolf, Heidi Herr, Laura Hibbler, Matthew J. K. Hill, David Hirsch, Stefanie Hunker, Jamie Johnson, Emily Kader, Jessica Keyes, Paula Kiser, Joel D. Kitchens, Maggie Kopp, Andrew Laas, Bill Landis, Christina Larson, David Lewis, Sara Logue, Maureen Maryanski, Jennifer Meehan, Ruthann Miller, Rebecca Miller Waltz, Meg Miner, Sarah Morris, Kevin M. O’Sullivan, Catherine Oliver, Barbara Olson, Anne Peale, Matt Phillips, Roxane Pickens, Julie Porterfield, Sara Powell, Marcus Robyns, Dylan Ruediger, Deirdre Scaggs, Carrie Schwier, Matthew Sheehy, Nicole Shibata, Dainan M. Skeem, Holly Snyder, Linda Stepp, Matthew Strandmark, Morgan Swan, Michelle Sweetser, Gabriel Swift, Jason Tomberlin, Niamh Wallace, Berenika Webster, Ashley Werlinich, Clare Withers, Lijuan Xu
Encounters with primary sources—historical or contemporary artifacts that bear direct witness to a specific period or event—are central to the pedagogy of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Their use in undergraduate instruction aligns with universities’ commitments to experiential and inquiry-based learning and library initiatives focused on media and information literacy. Reflecting the importance of the topic within higher education, “Supporting Teaching with Primary Sources” attracted the largest cohort of any Ithaka S+R program to date.
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Research Report
March 17, 2021
National Movements for Racial Justice and Academic Library Leadership
Results from the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2020
Academic librarians, like so many others in the higher education and library sectors, have discussed equity, diversity, and inclusion for many years. A number of prominent initiatives have worked to address these issues across the profession and within individual institutions. Yet, libraries have struggled to make progress on these stated values, especially in meeting their goals of employee diversification. The organizing led by Black Lives Matter activists in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd sparked an increase in demands…
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Research Report
March 3, 2021
Student Focused
Fostering Cross-Unit Collaboration to Meet the Changing Needs of Community College Students
Ensuring that community college students have access to academic and student support services requires more than simply understanding students’ needs—it also requires relating those needs to actionable service models and organizational strategies. Community college students navigate ecosystems of services provided and supported by academic affairs departments, student affairs departments, libraries, and faculty. How can these ecosystems best be organized and developed to adapt to changing student needs—particularly amidst the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic?…
Research Report
December 9, 2020
Academic Library Strategy and Budgeting During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Results from the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2020
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ithaka S+R surveyed library directors nationally to examine the strategic changes libraries have made to continue operating. A total of 638 library directors responded to questions about library leadership and decision making, COVID-19 management, budget allocations and cuts, collections acquisitions, and personnel changes. The questionnaire also focused on racial justice in light of recent protests including the Black Lives Matter movement and the related increased focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education.
Research Report
December 1, 2020
The Senior Research Officer
Experience, Role, Organizational Structure, Strategic Directions, and Challenges
The research enterprise continues to grow more complex, competitive, interdisciplinary, and interinstitutional. Although academic research often is conducted in a distributed and grassroots manner, the senior research officer (SRO) plays an increasingly central and unifying role in stewarding research activities and shaping institutional policies and strategies. The SRO—who often holds the title of vice president, vice provost, or vice chancellor for research—typically holds responsibilities including overseeing external funding, institutional research safety and compliance, core research facilities, and research ethics and…
Research Report
November 18, 2020
Research Data Services in US Higher Education
As data-driven research methods proliferate and become more sophisticated across disciplines, supporting researchers who work with data is increasingly a top priority for academic institutions. However, research data services—support offerings which enable and improve data research—are currently provided in an ad hoc manner by a variety of campus units, including libraries, academic departments and institutes, labs, and IT or research computing units. And the provision of research data services varies significantly from campus to campus. For data-driven research to thrive,…
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Research Report
November 16, 2020
Comparing Public Institution-Level Data on Students’ Family Income and Financial Aid
In a recent research report titled “Better Than We Thought,” our team at Ithaka S+R compared Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS) data on the parental income distribution of entering college students with two other public sources of socioeconomic information on that population. In the report, we first checked the consistency of the income distributions reported by IPEDS with a more comprehensive dataset of tax records collected by researchers Opportunity Insights. Finding that, at the level of aggregate groups of institutions…
Research Report
November 12, 2020
Ithaka S+R Art Museum Director Survey 2020
Art museums serve a unique social role in that they operate between the public sphere, the academy, the art market, and the philanthropic sector. They are invaluable resources for scholars and also serve school children, adults, seniors while engaging broadly in the cultural life of their cities. Beyond these roles, they also have the responsibility to maintain and care for a collection of objects for future generations in perpetuity. The Ithaka S+R Art Museum Director Survey 2020 examines strategy and…
Research Report
November 10, 2020
Structuring Collaborations
The Opportunities and Challenges of Building Relationships Between Academic Museums and Libraries
In 2019 Ithaka S+R received funding from the Mellon Foundation to study the structural relationships between academic museums and libraries. Ithaka S+R conducted interviews with museum and library directors, and in some cases other senior staff, at thirty universities. Based on these interviews, three institutions were selected for short case studies as examples of effective collaborations: University of Iowa, the Atlanta University Center, and Princeton University.
Research Report
October 26, 2020
The Impacts of COVID-19 on the Research Enterprise
A Landscape Review
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated disruptions have had a major impact on the US academic research enterprise. This report provides a landscape review of what is known about these impacts, from March through mid-October 2020, with an aim of identifying gaps that should be addressed. Our focus is on externally funded research, and therefore we emphasize STEM fields almost exclusively. As a result, we also focus on the largest research universities, which conduct an outsized share of this research and…
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Research Report
October 22, 2020
Student and Faculty Experiences with Emergency Remote Learning in Spring 2020
The emergency shift to remote learning that took place during the spring 2020 term in response to the COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented disruptions for students and faculty across colleges and universities, nationwide and globally. As online and hybrid models of learning become prolonged solutions for institutions seeking to contend with the realities of the pandemic and continued uncertainty, the field can gain valuable and actionable insights from the lived experiences of students and faculty at the height of the crisis.
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Research Report
October 21, 2020
Academic Health Sciences Libraries
Structural Models and Perspectives
Over the past twenty years, the place of the academic health sciences library (AHSL) within the university has changed markedly. These institutions include libraries that may support schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and public health. Once, they may have been established as separate entities, serving a single school or campus, but many are now consolidated under a larger university library. Have these consolidations and mergers improved the services offered or impacted cost or service quality? What new…