Institutional Research

by Kameron Kidd

The Office of Institutional Research is UL Lafayette’s most centralized data repository. Institutional Research is a division of academic affairs, and its mission is to provide accurate, consistent data and information about the University. This data supports administration in its management, decision making, and policy-formulation responsibilities.

Institutional Research regularly works with a broad spectrum of measurable data that the University has collected and will continue to collect throughout coming years. The office both creates and stores the University’s data on enrollment, degrees, majors, and student demographics. As such, most of the office’s activities involve interacting with a massive database by finding ways to report and disseminate information as efficiently as possible in the clearest format. This database interaction and information reporting is chiefly achieved through Cognos. Cognos is a business intelligence and performance management suite of software applications. The suite is composed of nearly three dozen software products which can be used with relational and multidimensional data sources from multiple vendors, including Microsoft, NCR Teradata, SAP and Oracle. The software is designed to enable business users to extract corporate data, analyze it, and assemble reports. Cognos provides Institutional Research versatility in terms of supplementing campus activities with necessary data, but the office relies most heavily on Cognos’s reporting function. Some of the more specific ways the office provides support through data reports would be assisting employees requesting information to complete accreditation reports, helping students or parents looking for enrollment data by major, and providing demographic reports to external agencies as they commonly request facts about the University. Additionally, the office is responsible for reporting to internal University constituents, federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) reporting, submitting Board of Regents data files, generating retention reports, and administering Student Evaluation of Instruction (SEI) at the end of each semester.