Providing effective practices and thought leadership that stimulates and sustains the growth of MCC as a national exemplar of evidence-based decision making.
The Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRDS) at Mott Community College transitioned its reporting line to the President’s Office in AY 2017-2018. This change situated the IRDS office as a more prominent member of the institution’s leadership hierarchy. Under the direct guidance of MCC’s President, Dr. Beverly Walker-Griffea, the IRDS staff recast their role as an essential, go-to internal resource for institutional effectiveness, strategic planning, accreditation, and outcomes assessment in addition to performing core functions related to compliance and institutional research initiatives.
In short, the IRDS office realignment was one part of Dr. Beverly’s overarching objective: to instill at Mott Community College a vibrant culture of data-informed decision making and establish MCC as a national model of evidence-based postsecondary education.
However, in early 2020—like nearly every U.S. college and university—MCC switched to a remote academic and hybrid workplace in response to the pernicious effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when MCC’s leadership and the broader community in Flint, MI arguably needed the resources and analytical capabilities of a fully staffed institutional research and effectiveness office more than ever, IRDS experienced a dramatic turnover of its staff including the departure of several directors and numerous analytical staff.
This created a vacuum that forced other MCC divisions (Information Technology Services and the newly formed division of Student Academic Success) to begin cultivating their own approaches and methodologies to ensure MCC’s critical business intelligence, analytics, regulatory compliance, strategic planning, and institutional effectiveness needs were met.
In August 2022, as MCC began returning to in-person instruction and a majority on-campus workforce, Dr. Walker-Griffea and the MCC Executive Cabinet engaged Ellucian Institutional Research & Effectiveness Services to transform the IRDS office. Shortly thereafter, the three-person IRDS team conducted a thorough evaluation of the office’s governance structure and determined that IRDS should adopt a fresh perspective to guide its work.
This document is the culmination of IRDS staff’s self-evaluation. At a series of mini-retreats beginning in February 2023 and concluding in January 2024, we developed and refined a new statement of the IRDS office’s mission, vision, and values. This document is intended to serve as a framework. It speaks to how we will conduct our work (including the design of our own internal annual, semi-annual, quarterly, and monthly goals). It emphasizes collaboration with staff, faculty, and students across MCC’s campus to support them in meeting their goals. It is aligned with MCC’s current Strategic Plan (2022-2024) and anticipates the development of a new plan that will take effect beginning in 2025.
While this document is forward-facing and oriented toward tangible, realistic outcomes, it also acknowledges the recent volatility in the IRDS office and the influence this had on the evolution of innovative analytical practices across campus. We are constantly inspired by our colleagues at MCC and have the utmost respect for their perspectives on IR and IE practices.
Thus, the IRDS mission and values provides a higher level of accountability—to ourselves and our stakeholders—that will guide how we communicate about institutional effectiveness.
The mission of the Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRDS) is to provide a set of effective practices and thought leadership that stimulates and sustains the growth of Mott Community College as a national exemplar of evidence-based decision making.
The Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRDS) delivers equitable and sustainable information literacy practices that enable our stakeholders to tell the story of Mott Community College—its people, its programs, and its progress—through data.
We affirm that the work of institutional research and decision support occurs within a larger paradigm of institutional effectiveness and continuous improvement, and that this work is not inherently objective nor ever completely finished.
We acknowledge MCC’s dual identity. It operates as an institution of higher learning— one that must conform to a specific regulatory and academic framework. It also functions as a cultural mainstay that extends beyond the higher education landscape of Mid-Michigan—one whose steadfast presence during the past one hundred years has shaped the lives of many thousands of people within the communities of Flint, Genesee County, and beyond.
We embrace our mutual responsibility to serve as stewards of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom about MCC and to uphold our professional values with integrity as we strive to achieve our office’s mission and goals while living into our vision.
As employees of the Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRDS), we value:
