Publications

Generative AI has quickly gained a significant foothold in academia, and is now used widely for teaching, learning, and research purposes. New products are appearing so rapidly that just keeping up with them is difficult, and understanding the value of individual products in a now-crowded marketplace is a major challenge for end users and for university CIOs, IT departments, and others involved in decision making about which products will be supported and/or licensed for campus users.

Each student enters college with their own unique set of goals, lived experiences, challenges, and hopes. Postsecondary institutions are challenged to build robust student supports that help these students each achieve their own version of success. This requires developing supports that work for a wide variety of target populations, such as for traditional-aged students entering college directly after high school as well as for returning adults seeking to build on credits they earned elsewhere a decade ago.

The scholarly publishing sector is undergoing its second digital transformation. The first saw a massive shift from paper to digital, but otherwise publishing retained many of the characteristics of the print era. In this current second digital transformation, many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era are being revamped in favor of new approaches that bring tremendous opportunities, and also non-trivial risks, to scholarly communication. It is our objective with this paper to examine the…

An essential step to refining an institution's underlying strategy for advancing teaching and learning excellence is to understand the models for instructor support at universities and how evidence about teacher practices and needs is used to inform those services. This paper outlines which units on campus have instructional support mandates and how those units typically engage with teachers both at their own institution and nationally.

As of 2023, 43.6 million borrowers owe more than $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. The burden of debt negatively impacts borrowers' ability to provide for their families, purchase a car, or buy a home. However, there is another, often overlooked, institutional debt that students may owe their former institutions after stopping out. It is estimated that 6.6 million students owe $15 billion in unpaid balances to their institutions.

What happens to print sales when an OA edition of a scholarly monograph is also available on publication? This is the central focus of this report, which is authored by members and representatives from the Association of University Presses and Ithaka S+R. Beyond exploring the question of the role of print sales in OA monograph publishing, we will also touch briefly on how print sales fit into the overall financial equation of a sustainable OA book model.

In an effort to make visible the national landscape of access to educational technology in prison education programs, Ithaka S+R launched a national survey in the fall of 2022. The survey asked respondents about student access to technology in their higher education in prison program, collecting demographic information before focusing on four thematic areas: technological devices, learning management systems and software, network connection and internet access, and future technology plans.

This report includes the key findings from the technology in higher education in prisons survey that Ithaka S+R fielded in 2022. The survey focused on four thematic areas: technological devices, learning management systems and software, network connectivity or internet access, and future information technology plans.

This publication provides four focused examples about specific institutions that have worked to address the imperative to redress their relationships with historically marginalized communities/ Cette publication fournit quatre exemples ciblés d’établissements qui ont spécifiquement travaillé pour répondre à l’impératif de redresser leurs relations avec les communautés historiquement marginalisées.

As the pandemic recedes into memory, societies find themselves at a crossroads. For several years, the decision to hold hybrid or virtual meetings was dictated by outside forces: it has now become a question of societies’ priorities, mission, and values. It is too early to tell whether the virtual meetings of 2020-22 were anomalies, but a casual observer might reasonably describe the “new normal” as nearly identical to the old one. A closer view suggests a more nuanced picture.

Movements for pay equity, including raising minimum wages and increasing pay transparency, have been building momentum in grassroots and policy arenas across the United States. As a result, museums, like many employers, face mounting pressure to better align their compensation practices with their diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments. Ithaka S+R’s research has found that the majority of art museum directors view pay equity as a high priority at their organization and are finding attracting and retaining diverse and talented staff…

MAAPS is a large-scale randomized-controlled trial designed to validate the effectiveness of intensive, proactive, technology-enhanced advisement in increasing achievement, persistence, and completion of historically underserved students. This final report on the project presents impact findings for the intent-to-treat effect of MAAPS advisement on participating students’ outcomes for the final analytic sample of 10,037 students and at each participating institution after six academic years.

Scholarly communication is the process through which research products and outputs (such as articles, audiovisual materials, data, code, and research methods) are created, assessed, improved, shared, disseminated, and preserved in a variety of modes including through formal and informal publications, conferences, and other academic networking methods. Shared infrastructure is a key enabler for delivering the services that authors and readers need. It is composed of standards, platforms, technologies, policies, and the communities that enable and support them.

Despite resurgent public interest in censorship issues, research and reporting on prison censorship policies remain largely localized, with few wide-scale studies of the issue. The highly decentralized nature of the carceral system in the United States complicate such an undertaking. In an effort to make available policy information more accessible and to develop a sense of how censorship policies might impact higher education in prisons, Ithaka S+R examined media review directives across all 50 states and Washington DC.

Librarianship has a racial diversity representation problem. Black, Indigenous, and people of color have been underrepresented in the field for decades, and despite the momentum and initiatives in support of diversifying the profession, the numbers appear to not have changed meaningfully. The data tell a consistent and compelling story: the library profession remains overwhelmingly white. Part of the problem stems from the fact that demographic information about the profession is not measured and reported in a consistent manner.

The things that get measured by an organization are a tell for what matters to the organization. Librarianship has been grappling with an underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) librarians for decades, and while libraries have developed a plethora of recruitment initiatives, the numbers appear to have not changed meaningfully, remaining static over the decades. A contributing factor may be that demographic information about the profession is not routinely measured and reported.

Since 2010, Ithaka S+R has conducted the Library Survey on a triennial basis with the overarching goal of tracking the perspectives, priorities, and leadership strategies of library deans and directors at four-year academic institutions. This study is designed to provide library and other higher education leadership with a high-level overview of the topics that are at the forefront of library leaders as they conceptualize the role, strategic alignment, and value proposition of academic libraries on campuses.

With climate change increasingly destabilizing environments, art museums find themselves in a highly precarious position, as they serve as a physical site for visitors, maintain their collections in perpetuity for future generations, and adapt their own practices to environmental sustainability standards. Ithaka S+R’s 2022 Art Museum Director Survey report, funded by the Kress Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, documents art museum leaders’ perspectives and strategies across a range of issues, including how museums are impacted by and planning for climate…

Executive Summary The Texas Student Success Program Inventory (SSPI), available at https://www.highered.texas.gov/sspi, is an online database of information related to student success programs at public colleges and universities, commissioned by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB). Consistent with nearly every other state, prior to the creation of the SSPI, there was no organized source of information about student success programming in Texas. By creating a user-friendly tool for publicly sharing information, the SSPI is…

This issue brief suggests that one key perspective that humanists can bring to larger debates about data sharing and open access research outputs is their uniquely well-developed infrastructure for the public sharing of knowledge creation, exemplified in the many public humanities initiatives that are a highly visible and vibrant part of humanities scholarship. Many recent public humanities projects emphasize community-driven, collaborative data generation efforts, in which knowledge is co-created with community participants not for the community.