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?
UCLA Undergraduate Females by Ethnicity, Entering 2003
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
African American
American Indian,
Alaska Native
% of UCLA Undergrads
Asian
Chicano/Latino
White/Caucasian
% of Travel Study students
Other/Unknown
% of EAP students
UCLA Undergraduate Males by Ethnicity, Entering 2003
18%
16%
14%
12%
10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
African American
American Indian,
Alaska Native
% of UCLA Undergrads
Asian
Chicano/Latino
White/Caucasian
% of Travel Study students
Other/Unknown
% of EAP students
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.