Outsourcing Student Success: The History of Institutional Research and the Future of Higher Education

American scholars of higher education—the faculty who study the intellectual, social and economic activity of colleges in the United States—have raised impediments to the scientific study of higher education and frustrated the accumulation of knowledge about what works for college student success for over fifty years.

At its inception in the early twentieth century, the field of institutional research aspired to apply scientific principles to the study of higher education and its administration. During the first fifty years of its practice, the field developed on a trajectory similar to other social sciences during the twentieth century, fostering more complex and rigorous studies of college success while also guiding statewide research on student access.

By the mid-1960s, when system-wide improvements gained traction across the nation, a growing body of academic literature on higher education decried institutional research as a threat to traditional prerogatives of faculty at the local institutions.

Prominent scholars of higher education called for “an academic orientation…bolstering the point of view of the faculty.” By the mid-1970s, this group gained control of the national associations for the study of higher education and the organizations subsequently dismissed institutional research—the scientific study of higher education—as an obsolete or misguided line of inquiry.

Over the next forty years, scholars associated with the national organizations argued that higher education institutions are intractably unique and, therefore, studies of colleges and universities do not lead to generalizations that support the accumulation of knowledge or the advancement of a social science.

Higher education scholarship, they claimed, “should not be expected to produce knowledge of pervasive and lasting significance” and research on higher education “is more an art than a science.”

As Clark Kerr famously declared, “the essential conservatism of faculty members about their own affairs” dominates the governance of American college campuses.

Faculty’s financial well-being, institutional stature, academic freedom, and influence on state policies are inextricably connected to how much American families, students, citizens, politicians, and policymakers support higher education. Conversely, Americans’ understanding of higher education unavoidably depends on the faculty who study and publish academic works on student learning and university administration. Thus, faculty has a vested interest in the areas of investigation and conclusions drawn from academic research on the nature of higher education.

Outsourcing Student Success asks important questions about the future of higher education in light of this interdependency: How have scholars of higher education coped with the inherent conflict of interest in their scholarship? How have faculty in higher education used and abused the entitlement to write the scholarship about their own affairs?

Today, the “essential conservatism of faculty” and the conflict of interests in higher education scholarship threaten to force university administrators to outsource a fundamental mission of higher learning—college student success—to private sector vendors of data science. As one recent study of the nation’s public higher education systems concluded, “The overall ability [of colleges]…to use data to look at issues affecting many of the cross-cutting issues of the day—such as the connections between resource use and student success—is nascent at best.”

Outsourcing Student Success brings to light the troubled history of institutional research over the past one hundred years, providing a lens through which to examine how the conservatism and conflicts of interest among faculty scholars has diverted the course of knowledge accumulation for what works for American higher education and its administration.

Joseph H. Wycoff, PhD, is a researcher and educational consultant who has worked in academic, market, and institutional research. He holds a doctorate in US history with an emphasis on business and consumer history. His institutional research experience includes work at the University of Washington, an Illinois community college, and a private nonprofit institution in New York state. His work reveals that the organization and literature for the profession are deeply flawed, and he shares his provocative observations about the history of scientific research on higher education in Outsourcing Student Success.

Dr. Wycoff has presented independent scholarship at the Social Science History Association, Business History Conference, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and New England Historical Association. He led research for the Washington State Governor's Task Force on Virtual Education in 2002 and has served as an evaluator responsible for research design and summative reports for federal grants.