Partnerships for International Education and Institutional Research Offices UCLA Office of Analysis and Information Management – Caroline West International Education Office – Malcolm Quon

Institutional Research (IR) and International Education (IE) teams: The benefits of collaboration Improve outreach and services –Learn whether academic program support for participants-- before, during and after study abroad--meets needs –Provide accurate information to potential participants, parents, accreditors, etc. –Identify and develop needed collateral services and information resources Develop more sophisticated queries (comparative studies over time, post graduation analyses, etc) Increase automation of data gathering, maintenance, etc.

Learn by integrating information from different data sources International Education Office data repositories –Program registration –Program evaluation Registrar’s database Surveys –CIRP freshman survey –Student Engagement –Alumni External databases –National Student Clearinghouse

How does the relationship work? IE identifies management questions, myths, anecdotal observations, student feedback, etc. IE and IR formulate the research question and identify information sources IR may help by data integration and analysis or by creating a dataset and providing it to IE for analysis IR can provide an added dimension: comparison to the entire student population

IR research example: Differences in participation by IE program, gender and ethnicity Compared UCLA Summer Travel Study and UC Education Abroad Program participants to the general UCLA undergraduate population Step 1: Disaggregate by both gender and ethnicity to identify different participation rates Step 2: Determine whether excluding engineering majors reduces the differences in participation rates Next steps: Are there opportunities for IE to develop programs to appeal to the underrepresented groups?

IE Research example Over 22,000 records of EAP course data –Over half of courses used for specific college/major/minor requirements –Top 5 countries for Major/GE credit: UK, Spain, France, South Korea, Italy –Over 60% of grades are A- or better (from 7,000 records) –About 3% of courses taken in Sciences/Engineering UCLA Summer Travel Study –40% of participants are leaving U.S. for the first time.