Research
The Clema research team writes original analysis for institutional research and effectiveness staff. Its interview findings come from semi-structured interviews with 50+ IR and IE professionals in 19 states, published as the Clema whitepaper. Its data posts are built from federal files (IPEDS, EADA, College Scorecard program data, BLS projections), and posts marked original data publish the queries behind every number.
How IR offices reduce time on data requests in three steps: standardize intake, centralize data sources (SIS, LMS, CRM, financial aid), and automate repetitive reporting.
What is institutional effectiveness assessment? The four-step plan, implement, evaluate, and report cycle, the four kinds of units assessed, and how IE lines up with accreditation.
Tableau and Power BI in higher education: what BI does well for IR, how their AI and natural-language features have changed, and the questions dashboards still cannot answer.
What "FERPA compliant AI" means in practice for IR offices: the school official exception, what SOC 2 and HECVAT do and do not prove, and a vendor question checklist.
What is institutional research? What an IR office does, what a Director of Institutional Research is responsible for, and how big a typical IR office is, with AIR survey data.
How to calculate retention rate for IPEDS Fall Enrollment Part E: who is in the cohort, what you can exclude, who counts as retained, and two worked examples.
Institutional research software falls into six categories: BI, higher ed data platforms, governance catalogs, survey tools, request intake, and AI assistants. What each does and how to choose.
A measured account of CIP 2020 adoption: 42 reportable new series, 38 claimed, 27 new codes that never graduated anyone, and the data science complex carrying half the volume.
The thinnest pipelines in the CIP to SOC crosswalk: 44 occupations under 100 graduates a year, the one-school pipelines, and the medical residency codes that make surgeon pipelines invisible.
A practical walkthrough for matching messy local program titles to CIP codes: the CIP user site tools, a defensible matching method, the two-codes-fit decision, and the nominate-a-new-code path.
How to rebase completion trends across the CIP 2010 to 2020 revision: what NCES moved and renamed, how the crosswalk classifies changes, and the repair patterns for splits, merges, and moves.
A plain-English explainer of CIP codes: the two, four, and six digit structure, who maintains it, the 2020 revision, and every federal system that hangs off it.
A plain-English explainer of SOC codes: the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification structure, where OEWS and projections data come from, and how IR teams should read it.
How the CIP to SOC crosswalk works: what a mapping means, the no-match and teacher rules, why the crosswalk is not outcomes data, and how to use it honestly in a program viability memo.
First-time freshmen by state of residence, 2016–2024: New York is down 15,700, Pennsylvania down 13,100, Alaska down a quarter. With in-state reliance for every state, a full exposure ranking.
A practical framework for IR teams drowning in ad hoc requests: a five-criteria scoring rubric, word-for-word scripts for saying no to deans, faculty, and cabinets, and what to say yes to instead.
A plain-English RAG explainer for institutional research: how retrieval-augmented generation works on campus data, why it fits IR work, where it fails, and the questions to ask any vendor.
Institution-level EADA analysis of the decade to AY 2024-25. 32.01 percent of continuously filing colleges cut a team, 261 of those cutters ended the decade flat or larger, tennis and golf supplied 40.5 percent of every drop, and the teams that disappear are small for years first. Two null results on Title IX, and the variable that actually predicts cutting.
On a balanced panel of 1,910 EADA filers, tennis is the only large sport in real decline: minus 97 institutions in ten years and minus 124 in twenty. Softball, golf, football and basketball all look like losers in the raw comparison and all four are positive once the institution set is held fixed. Meanwhile Other Sports went from 60 institutions to 432.
Women are 55.15 percent of undergraduates and 42.10 percent of athletic participants at the 2,037 institutions that filed EADA for AY 2024-25, a 13.05 point gap. It is wider than in 2014-15, football explains roughly half of it, and the 1,161 colleges that sponsor no football at all still carry 10.59 points.
Across 40,829 institution-year records from AY 2005-06 through AY 2024-25, EADA contains zero reported athletics deficits. In AY 2024-25, 1,288 of 2,037 institutions report revenue exactly equal to expense, to the dollar. What that means for the question your provost actually asked.
On a fixed panel of 4,902 colleges, office and administrative support fell from 13.95 to 10.10 percent of all staff between 2012 and 2024, a loss of 95,584 positions, while business and financial operations grew 43.7 percent. The full occupational breakout, plus the honest answer about where IR staff sit in IPEDS.
IPEDS 2024-25 completions divided by BLS 2024-34 annual openings for 17 CIP to SOC pairs, sixteen of them credential gated. Nursing 1.39, paralegal 0.25, 12 of 17 below 1.00, plus the state rankings and every reason to distrust them.
In PPD:2026, 159,461 of 209,321 programs have no published median earnings figure, and the same 159,461 rows carry no federal earnings-test determination. Here is the decision tree for why a cell is blank, the floors we could observe in the file, and how much a second source recovers.
3,804 of 109,790 IPEDS programs went dark after the 2022-23 award year, a 3.46 percent rate that has not moved in nine years. 76.7 percent of them awarded three or fewer credentials in their final year, the fields that churn fastest are mostly the ones adding programs at the same time, and field-level closure rates do not line up with the federal earnings test.
On the 3,361 GE programs in PPD:2026 where both regimes can be scored, 1,002 fail both, 569 fail only the old GE test and 19 fail only the new OBBBA test. The two casualty lists overlap on 63.0 percent of their combined 1,590 programs.
Sort 124 bachelor's fields by graduate earnings and the women's share of completions falls from 75.7% to 44.8%. Take nursing out of the top group and it drops to 27.0%. The field-level baseline IR teams can benchmark a program against.
Bachelor-level registered nursing produced 154,489 graduates in 2018-19 and 154,529 in 2024-25, a net change of 40 awards, while 113 more institutions reported a BSN program. Computing added 50,966. The full field-by-field breakout from IPEDS Completions.
We ran the official OBBBA earnings test across all 209,321 rows of PPD:2026. 1,220 programs fail, out of 44,052 actually tested, a 2.77 percent rate. Visual and Performing Arts carries 27.7 percent of the failures, associate degrees fail at 6.60 percent, and 455 programs miss by less than $2,000.
A running index of Clema news: product launches, whitepapers, IR benchmark releases, and company updates for IR and IE teams in higher ed.
The Clema reading index: every Clema guide, research paper, IR benchmark, conference list, podcast, book, and definitional framework, grouped by what you need it for. Updated as new pieces ship.
A when/lifecycle guide for IR teams: which months are peak, moderate, and low for ad-hoc requests, what reports and accreditations hit each season, and what to prepare ahead of time.
How a large IR team (8+ staff) uses Clema's analytics, peer benchmarking, and forecasts to answer for every school at once instead of one school at a time.
How an IR office uses Clema to keep definitions, sources, and terminology when its key analyst leaves. 85% of institutions rely on one person for this knowledge.
How an IR director uses Clema to surface the cohort definition on every answer, so "retention" stops meaning whatever the requester had in mind.
How an IE director uses Clema to keep stakeholders out of the email queue and let them ask dashboards in plain English, anchored in the whitepaper finding on dashboard adoption.
How a one-person IR office uses Clema to handle IPEDS pulls and ad-hoc dean requests in parallel during peak season, when capacity utilization hits 90%.
Quantified IR capacity benchmarks from 50+ interviews: 40 to 60% of team capacity consumed by ad hoc requests, 2 to 5 clarification cycles per request, and 220 to 3,200 hours annually reclaimable. By team size.
Where Clema does not fit today: very small institutions, no data source to connect, real-time pipelines, and bespoke statistical research.
How to phrase IPEDS questions in Clema: the four-part prompt, the cohort and year checks, the source check, and four worked examples.
A procedural guide for building a peer group in Clema by Carnegie class, control, region, or designation, and pulling the same metric for each peer in one conversation.
A procedural walkthrough for configuring SSO with Clema using SAML 2.0 or OAuth 2.0, including metadata exchange, attribute mapping, MFA, and the test login that confirms it works.
A week-by-week onboarding checklist for Clema: who does what, what gets signed, what gets connected, and what success looks like at each phase over 2 to 4 weeks.
IPEDS for beginners: what the federal dataset covers, how the three collection windows work, and five first questions with the source on every answer.
Five plain-English questions to ask Clema in the first session, what each one demonstrates, and how to interpret the sourced answer.
HelioCampus pricing is quote-only. What cooperative contracts and a public board approval show about the cost, and how Clema's published plans compare.
EAB Edify pricing from public records: a $36,000 to $216,000 fee schedule, service-hour rates, one five-year contract, and how Clema compares.
Why general-purpose AI assistants struggle with higher-ed data questions, and what a higher-ed-native AI gets right: domain knowledge, real data, and sourced answers.
Why IR office staffing lags data demand: national AIR survey data on office size, our interview data on ad hoc request load, and why hiring alone does not close the gap.
A practical release calendar for the 12 federal datasets IR and IE teams depend on: IPEDS, College Scorecard, Pell, loans, cohort default rates, Clery, EADA, PSEO, PPD, DAPIP, and BLS OEWS.
In a study of 20 IR and IE offices, one term routinely carried several valid definitions at once. Here is why that happens, the eight layers it happens at, and why it breaks reporting even when the data is clean.
A diagnostic for institutional research teams: the Institutional Intelligence Gap, the three tiers (55% Large, 40% Moderate, 5% Small), a five-factor self-assessment, and an illustrative cost model for key-person dependency in higher ed.
Creating data definitions is achievable. Maintenance is where most efforts collapse. Here is a six-step framework, an AI-readiness argument, and tier-by-tier next steps for IR/IE teams.
A directory of 25 ways to learn institutional research: graduate certificates, AIR professional development, free IPEDS and PDP training, executive programs, and self-paced courses, with formats, costs, and links.
IR teams already sit on years of attendance, GPA, LMS, and aid data. A practical guide to turning that record into forward-looking predictions that change what advisors, deans, and provosts can do this term.
A plain-English guide for IR leadership on why classical ML (specifically XGBoost) outperforms LLMs on student-level retention and graduation prediction, what the benchmark literature actually shows, and how to read a per-student risk score.
A straight comparison between the open-source predictive-analytics stack ($40 to $95 per month) and the major incumbent platforms ($30K to $200K per year). Covers infrastructure cost, licensing, where incumbents are strong and where they leave gaps, and a build-vs-buy framework.
A practical look at the features, engineering choices, and timing decisions that drive a real term-to-term retention model. Written for IR leadership who want to understand what the model sees before they hand its output to advisors.
The graduation use case in detail. Features, course-combination effects, plain-English metric reading, the small-group floor that prevents false certainty, and the drift management every long-horizon prediction needs.
A practical guide to the predictive questions Provosts and CFOs own. Enrollment forecasting (ARIMA, Prophet, LSTM), yield prediction, program margin and viability, IPEDS-based screening, and the honest limits of each.
PPD:2026 looks like a single dataset. On disk it's six Excel files joined on opeid6 + credlev + cip4, with mixed-vintage dollars, statistical-noise privacy suppression, and a CIP-4 key that doesn't match the CIP-6 the STATS test will use. Here's where the analyst hours actually go, and how to skip them.
35% of universities have no formal intake process, and 73.5% of IR teams cite vague or unclear requests as a bottleneck. Analysis of 18 university data request forms shows what the best systems do differently.
IPEDS 2023–2024 data reveals four-year institutions growing 3x faster in dual enrollment than community colleges, while community colleges carry 32.4% structural reliance. A full side-by-side benchmark.
Discover what IR teams actually benchmark most often, from student outcomes and faculty metrics to aspirational peer lists, based on evidence from 50 institutional research interviews.
73.5% of IR teams cite vague or unclear data requests as a bottleneck. Learn how Request Intelligence (the quality of a request at intake) decides whether your team spends its time analyzing or clarifying.
Discover proven strategies from IR leaders to streamline data requests, implement self-service dashboards effectively, and reclaim up to 60% of your team's capacity for strategic work.