The Office of Institutional Research and Academic Planning (OIRAP) gathers, analyzes, and uses data to inform institutional planning, policy development and decision-making. The Office provides critically important reporting, assessment, benchmarking, planning, and public information services to support institutional effectiveness and to respond to the needs of the university community and the citizens of New Jersey. Specific activities of OIRAP include responsibility for new program development; data and analytical support for university offices and committees; survey development, administration, and analysis; overseeing placement testing of new students, and internal, inter-institutional, state, and federal reporting.

The Office maintains a state-of-the-art data warehouse for reporting and analytical uses. Presently operational, the maintenance and continued development of the data warehouse is a dynamic process. The warehouse contains diachronic and current information on students, faculty, and staff. The information currently included in the data warehouse comes from various university legacy data systems, such as the Student Records Database (SRDB), Human Resources, Course Scheduling, and the Course Analysis System (CAS), as well as the state's Student Unit Record Enrollment (SURE) database. Other sources of data will include student placement data from the College Assessment Research System (CARS), student financial-aid data, faculty information from the Faculty Survey and other sources.

OIRAP utilizes a wide range of data from both internal (e.g., legacy data systems, the Office's own data warehouse and data collection efforts) and external (e.g., federal data from IPEDS and NSF, and information from data exchanges that the university participates in such as the Association of American Universities Data Exchange) sources to develop analytical tools that inform policy initiatives and support institutional decision-making. The Office performs this function through meeting the ongoing analytical needs of the central administration, consultation with academic and administrative officers throughout the university, and staff participation on and support of university and campus level committees.

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