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The bottleneck isn’t data. It’s interpretation.
ByMichaelAt most small institutions, the problem is not that IR can’t produce data. The problem is that nobody has time to think about what it means – including the IR director producing it. I run a three-person IR office at a Lasallian Catholic university in the Bronx. We produce enrollment reports, retention analyses, IPEDS submissions,…
Navigating the New Frontier: Generative AI in Institutional Research
ByMichaelWhat an amazing week at the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) Forum! I was privileged to present with the great and powerful, Dr. Jason Simon Jason and I led a session on generative AI in Institutional Research. In our hands-on workshop, we explored key skills like prompt engineering and worked through practical IR use cases….
I buried the AI lede
ByMichaelWhen new data enters the pipeline, a full rerun used to mean hours. Pull everything, re-join everything, wait. That was the cost of keeping enrollment data current. The architecture I described last week does not work that way. New data drops into the stage where it belongs and everything downstream picks up from there. A…
What the Customer Really Needed
ByMichaelClassic cartoon. Still so very true.

