Interview with David Davis-Van Atta
Marne Einarson (mke3@cornell.edu)

In this feature, we summarize the results of an “electronic interview” with an individual institutional research practitioner. Our goal is to foster broader knowledge and appreciation of the diverse membership of AIR, and of the different professional contexts and activities in which we are engaged.

In this issue, we interview David Davis-Van Atta, Director of Institutional Research at Vassar College (ddavisva@vassar.edu).

e-AIR: To start, tell us a bit about your current position.

David: I am Director of Institutional Research for Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Vassar is a small (FTE enrollment = 2,400), independent, undergraduate, liberal arts college. It has one of the larger endowments, and is highly selective in its admissions. This is a one-person IR office. I started this position about 1.5 years ago, so it still feels very new to me. But as new as Vassar still is to me, I may be an even newer phenomenon to Vassar. Vassar has never had an Office of Institutional Research per se or a Director of IR, for that matter. So we are both trying to figure each other out! It’s actually quite a process, for each side.

e-AIR: You’ve been responsible for establishing the first centralized IR office at Vassar. What has this entailed?

David: It’s entailed quite a lot. I came here from Carleton College where IR was very well-established. Datasets were plentiful and robust, institutional self-knowledge and understanding was deep and wide, and the college knew and understood IR very well. For the most part, this is not the case at Vassar — at least not yet. My job can be described as working to make all of these things come true here. It sometimes feels like an astronomical effort!

So far, I’ve been engaged in two general types of work. First is what I call the “flour and sugar” work. Before one has any idea what kind of cookies or cake s/he will bake, you know there are just certain ingredients that will be needed such as flour and sugar. In IR terms, these staple ingredients are basic data sets: e.g., detailed faculty information, student data from surveys and institutional files, and comparative data from our peer colleges. At Vassar such data are scattered over many offices, divisions, and functions. But the “pantry shelves” in IR are rather bare; you name the data, and Vassar’s IR office probably doesn’t have it! Or didn’t. I am working to develop these numerous basic informational and analytic resources that every high-functioning IR office requires. I’ve made a lot of progress but there is still a long way to go.

Of course I can’t devote all my time to developing data and systems. The second type of work I do is conducting analytic studies. The President, senior officers, the Board, faculty committees, etc. need information on all manner of topics. And the recent year or so has been a very trying time for higher education. As a result, there have been many decisions here that would benefit from good information. So, I also have been trying as best I can with the resources I have to do these types of studies as well.

It’s a real challenge to do both types of work! Each needs the other. So it is something of a boot-strapping kind of position, like using alternate rungs of a ladder.

e-AIR: You’ve been at this “creating a new IR office” endeavor for about a year and half now. Are there some accomplishments thus far that you feel particularly good about? What have been some of your greatest challenges?

David: I have developed some very robust systems for analyzing and reporting comparative data between Vassar and its peer colleges. These systems can operate on any sets of data that I drop into them: admissions measures, endowment statistics, enrollment, graduation rates, financial ratios, etc., etc. To date, I have managed to collect and install data for many such measures. The Board is very keen to have a good set of strategic indicators of institutional strengths, weaknesses, and direction. These datasets need a lot more work, but many are done, and the basic systems for them are now fully developed.

I’ve also installed and begun to use various survey datasets: CIRP Freshman Survey data, Senior Surveys, an Alumni Survey, the HERI Faculty Survey, etc. We had some hardcopy printouts when I arrived, but not a single dataset for a single survey. Here too, there is still a long way to go, but a good start has been made.

IR also has contributed substantively to a number of current questions and problems. One example, which happened within weeks of my arrival, was the issue of whether or not Vassar should eliminate undergraduate student loans from financial aid packaging and replace them with grant aid – a move some of our peer colleges had undertaken. This is an analysis tailor-made for IR. Can we afford to do this? And from a marketplace perspective, can we afford not to? Since then, there have been many other opportunities to conduct good analyses and bring them to the decision table. The Board is very pleased to have IR as a source of information for decision-support. One of them keeps calling me “a rock star” here. Sort of like Mick Jagger, but as a data geek! I like that.

There are many challenges when launching a new office but the biggest one is not related to data, or systems, or anything I’ve already mentioned. By far the biggest thing is trying to get IR to be visible, known, and well understood at Vassar. Some individuals here definitely “get it” but as an institution, Vassar doesn’t really understand yet what IR does or can offer. There is not a culture of turning to IR for information. And there are not active, visible forums for IR to present its work. Changing the institutional culture about data, self-understanding, and analytically-based decision-support has been, and remains, the biggest challenge I’ve encountered.

e-AIR: Let’s step back a bit – what is your academic and professional background? How did you arrive at IR as a profession?

David: I grew up in an academic environment. My father taught experimental psychology at Oberlin and I practically grew up in his lab. By age seven, I was helping with the experiments -- wiring rat mazes and taking data. I was a boy chemist; I did a lot with electricity, magnetism, and then electronics. I seriously frightened my parents a time or two with things I did (e.g., some home rocketry!). I internalized the scientific method well before I even knew it was something already well-developed as a method of understanding, and most important, I acquired an abiding love of science. Eventually, I developed a serious interest in astronomy.

I went to Carleton College and have undergraduate degrees in physics and astronomy. I always figured I’d go to graduate school for a Ph.D. in one of these fields, but life intervened in unexpected ways and I didn’t. At some point, it dawned on me that it was too late — the Ph.D. train had already pulled out of the station for me. Fortunately, by that point I was doing IR, and was quite happy with the work!

I worked for Oberlin College first in admissions, developing early computer systems for the office, and doing research on the data they collected. It was some of the earliest research into the college selection process, and formed the basis for what we now call “enrollment management.” But at that time, we didn’t have names for it. It was, to me, just doing science — research. I got great joy in learning new things, chiefly regarding how prospective students and families go about selecting a college, and Oberlin’s image and position in that process. There were only maybe a dozen people earnestly working on these problems at that time. I was one, and it was great fun, as well as useful work. With Larry Litten, I co-developed the College’s Board’s Admitted Student Questionnaire (the ASQ).

After three years in admissions at Oberlin, I moved into IR. I continued the admissions-related work but slowly broadened into the other areas of the IR function that we all now know as the core parts of the profession. I did a project in the mid-1980’s on the role of liberal arts colleges in the undergraduate stage of the nation’s science pipeline which garnered national attention. This was totally unexpected but great fun. It was my Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame. There were stories about this work in the New York Times and Washington Post, but for me, the articles in both “Science” magazine and in “Scientific American” were the pinnacle. To someone who loves science, this recognition is about as good as it gets, even if I hadn’t managed to do it in some aspect of physics.

After IR work at Oberlin I did a brief stint in a consulting firm for non-profit marketing and management — just long enough to learn that I did not really love consulting. Fortunately, I was hired away by one of our clients, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute — an acclaimed non-profit biomedical research organization. I worked in their Grants division, and conducted research for their various grant programs, and studying their effectiveness. For a science geek like me, the opportunity to be around that level of science was thrilling. I met seven Nobel Laureates during my time there, including Watson of Watson and Crick, the discoverers of the double-helical structure of DNA. I did two projects working with him on grants to support science education initiatives.

I eventually got an altogether unexpected call from Carleton, my alma mater, about the IR Director position there. I had thought on occasion how good that position would be but never expected this would actually ever happen. I got the job and had 13 excellent years there. Carleton is wonderful school with a long-established IR function, and Northfield, MN was a good place for kids to grow up. I was very fortunate to get the position there and I still miss it greatly.

I then got another unexpected call about IR here at Vassar. It came at a time when our youngest child had gone to college and we were more mobile as a couple. My wife particularly wanted to have “another adventure” before retirement. I knew the new Vassar president, Cappy Hill, from her research and her term as Provost at Williams. I knew she would be a terrific president to work for. I was also attracted by the opportunity to create a new IR function where one had never existed. In some ways, it makes sense to take what one has learned in a professional lifetime of doing IR and try to apply that at a good school that hasn’t had IR. In all likelihood, it will be the final job I do before retirement. If I succeed, I can retire feeling that I’ve accomplished something.

e-AIR: Tell us about some of your interests outside of work.

David: I have always had many more interests than I can really do — particularly outdoorsy activities. I’ve loved cycling all my adult life. I rode a bike home from college (700+ miles) in 1970 long before there were helmets or the idea that you could do such a thing. More recently, I did RAIN, the Ride Across Indiana: a 165 mile, one-day ride. It was exhilarating and I can honestly say that pizza and beer never tasted as good as they did after that ride! I collected butterflies as a kid, and have kept up some of this work as an adult. I don’t do much collection because species levels are so much lower now than they were. I do annual population counts for my region for the North American Butterfly Association. I have developed a love of gardening in the last 10 years that has provided a kind of spiritual side to my life that I never knew before. I had beautiful water gardens in Minnesota (www.flickr.com/photos/DDVA1) but have not yet found ways to garden like this in NY. I raise orchids, I guess just because I find them so compellingly beautiful. I got captivated by two or three of them maybe seven years ago or so, and now have perhaps 50. They are challenging plants, but very rewarding when (if!) they bloom.

e-AIR: What words of advice would you offer to someone just beginning in IR?

David: Have fun with it. We all have some things that we simply have to do — often a big set of them. But also be sure to pursue some questions that you are curious about — things that seem promising to your institution, and/or to you personally, where the answer is not yet known. Not all these efforts will succeed, but some will. And with those, you will have made some a genuine contribution to your institution and to the field. That is about as good a thing to do as I know. Go for it! Try to preserve 10 percent of your total time for what might be called basic research, exploration into some question where the answer is not known, in addition to the applied work that we all need to do in IR.

Fundamentally, IR for me has been a life in science: research and discovery. That is how I have always approached the work, trying never to come to it from the perspective of some pre-conceived outcome. As simple as that is to say, it’s not easy to do. But that’s been my approach. And it has allowed me to do in life what I learned to love at an early age. I do miss physics. Astronomy has had what will long be seen as one of its golden ages during my lifetime. I keep up earnest interests in physics and astronomy and lately, in mathematics. I clearly cannot make contributions to the fields, but I can still learn things in them and I like that very much. I can still feel real satisfaction every now and then when I come to understand something I didn’t know before.

I wish I could live two lives. I would love to have done work in these scientific fields. But I love what I’ve gotten to do in IR as well. I would not want to give that up either! Is getting to have two lives too much to ask? I wish it weren’t so!

e-AIR: David, thank you so much for participating in this interview!

We welcome your feedback on this feature, including suggestions for individuals to be interviewed and questions you would like to have posed in future interviews. Please e-mail your comments and suggestions to Marne Einarson at mke3@cornell.edu.