Educause Core Data Service 2002 Summary Report

The 82-page Educause Core Data Service 2002 Summary Report summarizes data collected through a data survey about campus information technology (IT) environments at more than 635 colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. The report focuses on issues such as staffing levels in departments responsible for instructional technology or research computing and provides benchmarks for colleges to use when analyzing their own information-technology practices.

http://www.educause.edu/coredata/reports/2002/

The report presents aggregates of data in five areas relevant to planning and managing IT in higher education: IT Organization, Staffing, and Planning; IT Financing and Management; Faculty and Student Computing; Networking and Security; and Information Systems. Appendices include a list of participating campuses, the 2002 survey instrument, a glossary of terms from the survey, and Carnegie classification definitions. While few of the report's findings are startling, it does offer some evidence of a continuing "digital divide" between relatively affluent and needy students in access to technology.

Some interesting findings:
- about 20 percent more students own computers at private institutions than at their public counterparts;
- there are surprisingly few strong differences among institutions in terms of how many classrooms are wired for Internet connectivity: about 81 percent;
- there are differences in expenditures on new administrative-computing systems among institutions, regardless of size: 25% for software, 20% for in-house staffing costs, 12% for new hardware, 11% for software-maintenance fees, 8% for training personnel to use the software, and 4% for other miscellaneous costs.

Educause cautions that the new survey complements rather than supersedes other surveys of college spending on information technology. Two such surveys are the Campus Computing Project and the Cost of Supporting Technology Services survey.

Posted by Tom on October 10, 2003