For IR Directors
Trusted, sourced answers across your data
and the federal datasets you pull on
Directors of Institutional Research use Clema to bring IPEDS, peers, and their own institutional data into one plain-English conversation, with the source shown on every figure.
A day in the life of an IR office
Not a hypothetical. This is roughly what a week looks like for a 1 to 3 person IR shop, drawn from the patterns in our interviews with 50+ IR professionals across 19 states.
Monday, 8:40 a.m.
The board packet request with no cohort attached
The provost's chief of staff emails asking for retention rates by Pell status for the last five years, needed for Friday's Board Academic Affairs packet, with no cohort definition attached.
You build a first pass and send it back. An hour later: no, we meant first-time, full-time only, and can you also split by college. Two more rounds follow before the number is locked, days before the actual meeting.
With Clema: You ask Clema for the figure in plain English. It resolves against your locked first-time, full-time retention definition and asks the one clarifying question that matters (which college breakdown) instead of guessing. The number is locked the same afternoon, not Thursday night.
IPEDS week
A federal deadline collides with three unrelated inboxes
It's Fall Enrollment and Graduation Rates component week. You're cross-checking every submitted cell against last year's snapshot to catch drift, while a program review number, an assessment committee ask, and a reporter's public-records request land in the same inbox and can't wait until the federal deadline clears.
With Clema: The three unrelated requests get answered directly by the people who asked, sourced to the same data your IPEDS submission draws on. You keep your attention on the drift check instead of splitting it three ways.
Mid-cycle accreditation
A number from three years ago, with the analyst long gone
The visiting team asks for the exact cohort logic behind a persistence figure reported three years ago. The analyst who built that query left the office eighteen months ago and didn't document the exclusion rules, so the number has to be reverse-engineered from an old spreadsheet before the site visit.
With Clema: The definition and exclusion rules behind that figure are stored with the answer, not with the person who ran the query. You pull the methodology in minutes instead of reconstructing it from a spreadsheet nobody remembers building.
The night before
A budget hearing that needs peer numbers by morning
The VP of Enrollment Management asks for a quick comparison of admit-to-enroll yield by program against three named peer institutions, the night before a budget subcommittee hearing. It isn't quick: the peer numbers live in College Scorecard and IPEDS, the internal numbers live in the SIS, and reconciling naming conventions between them eats the evening.
With Clema: Peer figures from IPEDS and College Scorecard sit in the same conversation as your SIS data, so the reconciliation work Clema already understands the naming conventions on both sides doesn't become your evening.
How Clema helps
The work that eats your week, handled in minutes.
Sourced answers, every figure
Every response carries its data source, calculation method, and audit trail. You ship figures you can defend to deans, accreditors, and the cabinet without a second pass.
Federal data in the same conversation
IPEDS, College Scorecard, Pell, EADA, and PSEO sit alongside your institutional data. Ask a peer-comparison or completion-rate question and get the federal source and year shown.
Strategic analysis, accessible
Clema understands higher-ed terminology out of the box, so your team spends its time on interpretation and recommendation rather than wrangling definitions and joins.
The old way vs. the Clema way
None of these are exaggerated. They're the pattern our research kept surfacing across IR offices of every size.
The old way
With Clema
The old way
A vague board request kicks off 2 to 5 rounds of email clarification before the number is locked, days before it's due.
With Clema
You ask in plain English. Clema resolves the question against your locked cohort definition and asks the one clarifying question that matters, inline.
The old way
The retention number lives in three places (the warehouse, an analyst's shadow spreadsheet, a two-year-old dashboard) and they don't quite agree. Our whitepaper found 82.4% of IR offices report data fragmentation across multiple systems.
With Clema
One definition-locked source of truth. Every answer is sourced back to the system and methodology it used, so the same question gets the same number twice.
The old way
The analyst who wrote the cohort exclusion logic left eighteen months ago and never documented it. The number has to be reverse-engineered.
With Clema
Definitions, exclusion rules, and prior answers live in Clema, not in one person's head or an orphaned spreadsheet.
The old way
A dean can't find the right filter on the dashboard IR built for exactly this question, doesn't fully trust what he sees there anyway, and emails IR for a manual pull instead.
With Clema
Same governed data, asked in plain English, with the source shown so the dean doesn't have to just take IR's word for it.
See Clema answer a real IR question
An illustrative example of the kind of drill-down a director actually needs before a board packet. Your figures will use your institution's own data and definitions.
Example figures for this walkthrough · First-time, full-time retention
| Cohort | Retention rate |
|---|---|
| Fall 2020 | 79% |
| Fall 2021 | 80% |
| Fall 2022 | 81% |
| Fall 2023 | 82% |
Example figures for this walkthrough · Fall 2023 cohort
| Group | Retention rate | N |
|---|---|---|
| Pell recipients | 76% | 412 |
| Non-Pell recipients | 85% | 1,180 |
| First-time Pell, College of Engineering | Suppressed (n<10) | 8 |
What ad-hoc requests actually cost your team
From our study of 50+ IR professionals across 19 states. Read the whitepaper.
40-60%
of team capacity goes to ad-hoc data requests instead of strategic analysis
73.5%
of requests arrive vague or unclear, taking 2 to 5 rounds of clarification before fulfillment
220 to 3,200 hrs/yr
reclaimable depending on team size: 220 to 330 hours for teams of 1 to 3, up to 2,133 to 3,200 for teams of 8 or more
What the research says
This isn't just our whitepaper. The pressure on this role shows up in independent research from four different angles.
~Half
of IR office leaders say their staff size isn't sufficient for their current workload; only 56% call their process for managing that workload adequate.
Association for Institutional Research (AIR)2025 → 2041
the national count of high school graduates peaks in 2025, then declines roughly 10.5% below 2023 levels by 2041, unevenly across regions.
WICHE, Knocking at the College Door (11th ed.)29%
of provosts say they consistently have the resources to implement institutional initiatives, even though 86% say they like the job.
Inside Higher Ed, 2025 Survey of Chief Academic Officers34%
of research and institutional research staff cite job security as a top reason they're looking for other jobs, above the higher-ed-wide average.
CUPA-HR, 2025 Higher Education Employee Retention SurveyWe ran our own primary research too: 85% of institutions depend on a single person for institutional knowledge. See the Institutional Intelligence Gap study.
Where Clema fits with what you already have
Clema sits on top of the systems you already run and the public federal datasets you pull on. It doesn't replace any of them, and it doesn't ask you to migrate data anywhere.
Clema
Conversational layer. Ask in plain English, get a sourced answer.
Your systems
Federal datasets, built in
64.7%
of IR offices report their self-service dashboards go underused
82.4%
report data fragmented across multiple systems that don't talk to each other
"The issue is not the absence of tools; it's the absence of integration."
Clema is the layer that makes the infrastructure you already have actually get used: one plain-English question, answered against your existing systems, with the source shown.
What Clema gives your team
Sourced
Every figure carries its origin and method
One window
Federal and institutional data together
Higher-ed native
IPEDS, accreditation, and IR terms built in
IR Director FAQs
What does Clema give an IR Director?
A single conversational surface over your institutional data and the federal datasets you pull on, with sources shown on every figure. Ask for completion rate, FTE, or graduation rate by cohort in plain English and get the calculation with the NCES source attached.
Does Clema replace our BI tools and dashboards, or the SIS?
Neither. Clema sits on top of your SIS, data warehouse, and BI tools like Tableau and Power BI rather than replacing them.
Our whitepaper research found 64.7% of IR offices report their self-service dashboards go underused, often because people don't know where to look or don't trust what they find there, not because the dashboards are badly built.
Clema gives people a plain-English way into the same governed data instead of asking every dean and VP to become a dashboard power user.
If two people in different offices ask the same question, will they get two different numbers?
No, that's the specific failure mode Clema is built to close.
Clema resolves questions against your locked definitions (your official first-time, full-time retention cohort, or your IPEDS graduation-rate methodology) rather than whichever spreadsheet or dashboard filter a given user happens to land on.
Every answer is sourced back to the definition and dataset it used, so a dean and a provost asking the same question in the same week get the same number, with the same citation.
How does Clema handle IPEDS, accreditation, and state reporting cycles, not just ad hoc requests?
Clema connects directly to public federal datasets, including IPEDS, College Scorecard, Pell, EADA, and PSEO, alongside your internal systems. With that in place, you can:
- Cross-check a submitted IPEDS figure against prior-year values
- Pull the historical methodology behind a number an accreditation site visit team is asking about
- Ask for completion rate, FTE, or graduation rate by cohort and get the calculation with the NCES source shown, without rebuilding the query by hand
How do we verify an answer before it goes into a board packet or accreditation report?
Every Clema answer comes with a visible source trail: which dataset or system it pulled from, which definition or IPEDS methodology it applied, and when the underlying data was last refreshed. That means your staff review the sourcing, not re-derive the number from scratch, before it goes to a provost, board committee, or accreditation site visit team.
What happens to institutional knowledge if our IR director or sole analyst leaves?
This is a known risk in the field, not a hypothetical one.
Our companion research on 20 IR/IE professionals found 85% of institutions depend on a single person for institutional knowledge, and 55% sit in what we call the Large Gap tier, where core definitions are effectively one resignation away from being lost.
Clema keeps definitions, cohort logic, and prior answers in a system of record rather than in one person's head or an undocumented query, so a departure doesn't mean rebuilding institutional memory from scratch.
How does Clema handle data governance and security for IR-owned definitions?
Clema is SOC 2 Type II certified and FERPA-ready by design, built on:
- Read-only credentials
- SAML 2.0 SSO
- TLS 1.3 encryption
- Full audit logging on every query your team runs
Clema doesn't create a new copy of student-level data outside your environment's security boundary; it works within the access controls you already have.
Your team keeps ownership of the underlying metric definitions; Clema makes them consistently askable instead of drifting across shadow spreadsheets.
How long does it take to start getting value from Clema?
Most IR teams connect their SIS, warehouse, and IPEDS extracts and are live in two to four weeks, including analyst training. Start free on a sample data source first, so your team sees a sourced answer before committing to the full connection.
Try Clema on your data
Start free on the Free plan, or book a demo with IR scenarios built for your institution.