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Vision

The Office of Institutional Research strives to be a knowledgeable provider of accurate, unbiased, relevant, research-based information and a quality resource for ideas, solutions and strategies.

Mission

The mission of the Office of Institutional Research is to integrate and transform institutional data into objective information that informs the decision-making, planning and evaluation processes of the university. The office tracks, analyzes and reports information on key performance indicators to state and federal governing agencies, non- profit organizations and public-interest groups. The office routinely produces descriptive profiles of students and faculty; longitudinal studies of changing demographics; and, analytical reports of attrition and graduation rates.

Goals

• Enhance the quality and usefulness of information collected, maintained, analyzed and delivered to the campus community for planning policy, making decisions, accrediting programs and generating grant proposals.
• Demonstrate Northwestern's compliance with governmental intent by preparing and maintaining documentation on key quality and performance indicators used by state agencies to develop education goals and policies and to allocate resources.
• Collect, maintain, analyze and disseminate information used by federal agencies, national research consortiums, non-profit professional organizations and public media groups to compare the effectiveness and performance of Northwestern's academic environment to higher education institutions nation-wide.
• Enhance the relevance of the office as a resource and provider of research-based, analytical and longitudinal information by integrating knowledge about conditions and trends in higher education obtained from the campus community, higher education researchers and professional colleagues.
• Migrate and integrate data that is collected and maintained on campus into a centralized data warehouse and build the infrastructure to deliver relevant segments of the information to authorized faculty and administrators for managerial purposes.