About Us
Mission Statement
The Office of Institutional Planning & Analysis (IP&A) at California State University San Marcos actively collaborates with campus stakeholders, inspires institutional transformation, and impacts student success by supporting evidence-based planning, decision making, and action; serving as a trusted source of high-quality, official information reported to internal and external stakeholders; and seeking new and innovative ways to make data accessible, intelligible, and transparent.
Values
- Student Success - Honoring the centrality of student success in our work.
- People Focused - Forging meaningful relationshipss, promoting work-life balance, and investing in professional development.
- Integrity - Working with integrity, ensuring accurate, ethical, and appropriate use of data.
- Problem Solving - Engaging in critical thinking and creative problem-solving.
- Teamwork - Furthering collegiality, teamwork, and mutual respect.
- Data-Informed Decision Making - Fostering a culture of data-informed decision making on our campus.
Institutional Research Key Functions
An institutional research (IR) office provides information to help higher education institutions make decisions. This information comes from a variety of research and analytic projects, data-gathering tasks, and reporting activities. IR offices serve as strategic partners to campus leadership and community members, helping to inform decisions about policy formulation, strategic planning, resource allocation, program development, and continuous improvement. In addition, IR offices typically perform mandatory reporting of campus data to internal and external stakeholders, such as the CSU Chancellor’s Office, accrediting organizations, state and federal governments.