University Times

When you need the facts on Pitt Institutional Research is the office you should call

At Pitt, Jim Ritchie is the keeper of the facts.

When people want to know just about anything about the University, they usually turn to the Office of Institutional Research (IR), where Ritchie and his staff of seven have the facts at their fingertips.

Ritchie has been involved with institutional research and its companion discipline of policy studies for 25 years, and has been director of IR since 1994.

"We are, in a sense, the historians of the University regarding employment, organizational profiles, enrollments, salaries. We are statistical historians: We maintain for all time the enrollment, employment, student and faculty characteristics, in effect the abstract of the institution," Ritchie said.

"But we also put data into an analytical environment where you can manipulate it, re-sort it, add it, sub-divide it – what's called 'slicing and dicing' today – so that we can look back and easily see trends, draw conclusions, do benchmarking, and look ah ead to policy analysis, decision-making and academic planning." Soon IR will be expanding services by providing instant data access to a much wider audience, Ritchie said. A four-year-long initiative of the Provost's office known as CERMIS (Curriculum, Enrollment, Recruitment Management Information System) will be imp lemented over the next few months. CERMIS is a new on-line, end-user-friendly, web-based query system that will tap into the University's mainframe database.

"This is the new wave – making data that we use from our planning systems, from our analytical database, open to nearly everybody. There are new tools in computing that will allow us to put our data in an environment that is instantaneously available. That will, in theory, allow anyone to do, in a desktop environment, what we do: query the database, ask a question, get a profile of exactly what is desired, in a drop-down menu format. It will be as easy as building a spreadsheet," Ritchie said.

"I don't think this will put us out of business. But the nature of questions we get might change. Someone who tries to manipulate raw data into benchmarks or standards or whatever they're seeking still has to do the Œmental algorithms.' For example, if yo u're counting employees, how would you count them: by position? by level of education? by years of service? There are lots of different ways to Œslice and dice' people, and we can be of help." Several other IR initiatives are in the works, including individualizing financial aid queries, overhauling the graduation and retention reporting system, working toward a paperless data exchange system with fellow institutions in the Association of Ameri can Universities and redesigning the government-required faculty activity reporting system.

"I think Pitt's always been ahead of the curve, as some of our current initiatives show," he said. But the regular work continues relentlessly.

"We are primarily a client-driven office," Ritchie explained. "Our main clients are the chancellor, provost, and vice chancellors, particularly those concerned with undergraduate and graduate programs and academic planning, though we get calls for informa tion from everybody from faculty to staff to students to non-University people. "We do the best we can to respond to all of those people within the limits of our resources. If it's public information that exists, that's Œon the shelf,' we'll give it to them," Ritchie said.

Ritchie said there were 193 requests for data from Pitt administrators and 232 requests from external clients in fiscal year 1998. External clients include government agencies, private and nonprofit sector groups, higher education institutions, publishers of college guides and individuals.

But if someone called asking for detailed information related to a specific responsibility area, IR would ordinarily direct the request to that area, Ritchie said.

Until recently, widespread inquiries from publishers of college guides had been consuming staff time and creating mounds of paperwork. "We were sending out the same information 50 times to 50 places, year after year," he said. "Well, someone got the brigh t idea to create a common data set for participating institutions that answers probably 80 percent of the questions in one place." This common data set is now linked to IR's web page. The web site maintains a list of IR-produced reports, such as surveys, economic impact studies, financial aid data, and student profiles. It also has an information request form that serves as an altern ative source to direct calls and the latest available version of IR's signature publication, the University of Pittsburgh Fact Book, which is printed each fall with a supplement each spring.

"The Fact Book is responsive to the most frequently asked questions," Ritchie said. "We probably have 600-700 calls a year asking what's our enrollment, what's the makeup of the student body, in one form or another, or similar information on faculty." IR also oversees a number of recurring external projects, including state- and federal-required compliance reports. According to Ritchie, the big thrust in public reporting was in the late '60s and early '70s when the federal government established the Higher Education General Information recording system and later the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Th e concept of requiring institutional data became a stimulus for Pitt to organize its systems. "It made the University decide how it wanted to present itself, in terms of organization, within these guidelines," he said. While Ritchie says the reports themselves are amazingly similar to what they were 20 years ago, the reporting methods have changed dramatically since IR's predecessor office, Institutional and Planning Studies, opened in 1969. "I remember IBM punch cards," Ritchie said of his mid-'70s days of data-gathering. "I key punched all our data, ran my own programs on FORTRAN and Basic. You used to take the punch cards to one common computer on the ground floor [of the Cathedral of lea rning], a DEC-1090, wait in line, load your cards, come back in a couple hours and the output was your result." By the early 1980s, the proliferation of desktop computers forced the office to adapt, according to Ritchie. "New desktop software, Windows, Word Perfect, EXCEL, and, eventually, on-line analytical processing tools – you can never keep up. "We're bombarded with products, journals and newsletters, demonstrations of new products and technologies. We try to plan for technology on a cyclical basis with a major review every 3-5 years. We try to get what we need for tomorrow, today; but it's cons tantly ongoing; our staff are always in classes or keeping up with developments." In 1994, IR was moved from Business and Finance and now reports to the Chancellor's Office. The change in reporting structure has benefited the office, Ritchie said.

The University administration "is really paying attention to our research in its policy analysis and institutional planning – which is really our mission, if you think about it," Ritchie said.

IR conducts annual surveys of entering freshmen and the graduation class and other ad hoc surveys, such as satisfaction surveys of enrolled students, withdrawing students and alumni. Ritchie maintains that current institutional policy has been influenced by the survey information.

"The survey work has probably been the most important work we've done. As an example, we've done a number of them with the goal of learning how to improve retention, what the rates are, how they compare with other institutions and what needs to be done to improve it," he said.

"We're beginning to see the effects in our more recent surveys. We see higher student satisfaction, better morale, improvements in the campus climate in our survey responses." Looking back over 25 years, Ritchie said, "I'm most proud of our establishing a consistent playing field on which all parties, all operations of the University can access information. We're precise with our data, we're precise with our publications. We ar e not a Œmoving target,' but a steady force.

"You know, data are fluid: Somebody paid a bill, got hired, enrolled in a class or whatever. It's ongoing. It never stops." The Office of Institutional Research is located at 1917 Cathedral of Learning. For more information about the office and its projects, call 624-6767. The IR web address is www.pitt.edu/~instres

-Peter Hart