IPEDS poised for ‘huge’ expansion

Inside Higher Ed reports that the U.S. Education Department is “quietly moving ahead with plans to significantly expand the information and data it collects from colleges each year” through IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. The plan appears to be driven by recommendations from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education report unveiled last fall.

Operation “Huge IPEDS” would broaden IPEDS data collection to include two new categories: “what the department calls ‘a new accountability part’ and an expanded section of information about financial aid, which seems to be designed to help the department come up with a method of reporting on the ‘net price’ that different categories of students might really pay (as opposed to the ‘sticker price’ that gets widely reported) to attend a particular college.”

Inside Higher Ed breaks it down:

Under the “new accountability part,” colleges would be asked a set of four questions. Some are straightforward; the department asks if institutions have online “fact books” and if they post information on their Web sites about assessment or student learning outcomes, and requests links to those pages, which the department says it would add to the Web-based College Opportunities Online Locator. …

But the department also asks whether colleges use specific student learning assessments, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, Community College Survey of Student Engagement, Collegiate Learning Assessment, and National Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, and to specify which other assessment tools they use. Colleges would also be asked to say if the institution makes its results on these measures available online on its own Web site, and to provide the appropriate Web address, which would also be added to the COOL Web site.

The department’s plan would also ask (and by 2008-9 require) colleges to provide, in matrix form, data on all accountability measures they use and “the institution’s score” on those measures. (The document does not make clear whether this information would be shared with the public, but if it would, colleges that now use these surveys and tests for internal purposes only would presumably be forced to reveal them.) The department’s request that a college report a single score for the institution is likely to renew concerns higher education leaders have expressed that the Spellings Commission’s push for accountability is overly simplistic, since most accountability measures that institutions use can’t be summed up in one “score.”

All of this must be approved by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget before it could take effect.

Shel Israel: PR in the Conversational Era

Note to the PR folks who read this blog:

Click on over to Shel Israel’s post, The New PR Practitioner, at Global Neighbourhoods. It’s worth your read. (Anal-retentive grammarian types — and you know who you are — please ignore Israel’s typos long enough to soak in the overall message. It’s important that you do.)

Israel has a solid PR agency background. He cut his teeth at Regis McKenna Inc., where “we were taught to be trusted sources of information for the press and analysts who could most influence our clients relationships with customers and prospects.” So he knows whereof he speaks. And this background gives him no small insight into the issues facing the modern-day PR agency.

That insight translates nicely into higher ed PR. Oh, sure, we don’t pitch as aggressively as a lot of the agency folk, and unlike many of our corporate colleagues we’re more interested in getting coverage for our institutions rather than keeping their names out of the press. But with the rise of social media, our role is evolving, and the very nature of our work — at institutions of higher learning, where online access is ubiquitous — ought to prompt a greater sense of urgency among us than our agency and corporate brethren.

Folks, we need to get this:

PR people have a future as the same kind of trusted resources we were back in the days of Regis McKenna. except now we can use blogging and social media. We get to establish our own credibility over time and when we discuss our own clients on our blogs, we are trusted sources of information relevant to our audiences. …

[I]f you are in the PR proffesion … you will not succeed if you focus on smiling and dialing a media list of strangers, if you are intent in inject hubris into what you have to say or write. If you think you can succeed by being just cute or clever, you are living in the wrong Era.

Today, you need to join the conversation. You are part of the news distribution system, not just for your clients, but for the community where your clients would like to flourish.

This to me is very liberating. The PR people I know and respect are all interesting people and great story teller. They often know so much more than their clients allow them to express. We are now in a Conversational Era. It looks like we will be in this Era for some time to come, and the best and brightest of the PR professionals will join in that conversation, while others will just be left behind.

So. What are we doing to build those relationships? How are we becoming those trusted sources of influence and information? How are we joining in on the conversation in this Conversational Era?