Universities are literally awash in data. From administrative data offering information about students, faculty and staff, to research data on professors’ scholarly activities and even telemetric signals–the functional administrative data gathered remotely from wireless networks, security cameras and sensors in the course of daily operations–that data can be an invaluable resource.
But a new study by researchers at UCLA and the MIT Press, published Dec. 23 in the journal Science, finds that universities face significant challenges in capturing such data, and that they severely lag the private sector and government entities in using data to solve challenges and inform strategic planning.
