Keynote Address by Professor Stephen R. Porter
Why response rates don’t matter, why we’re not measuring what we think we’re measuring, and the future of college student surveys
Biography
Stephen R. Porter is Professor of Higher Education at North Carolina State University. Prior to his faculty career, he spent nine years in higher education administration in the field of institutional research, most recently as Director of Institutional Research at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI on $9 million of funding from the Lumina Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education, among others. Dr. Porter is editorial board member for the American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Research in Higher Education. He is Chair of the Education Systems and Broad Reform grant review panel at the Institute of Education Sciences. He has been author for the Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, the Encyclopedia of survey research methods, AIR’s Applications of advanced statistics in institutional research, in addition to two decades of scholarship published in the most noted journals in the IR field. His work has been covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed., and University Business, and he has been the 2004 and 2012 Charles F. Elton Best Paper Award recipient from the Association for Institutional Research.