Change is constant, but meaningful transformation requires more than compliance—it requires intentional, equity-minded planning. This track explores the tools, frameworks, and strategies that IRPE professionals can use to center student voices, dismantle inequitable structures, and connect institutional effectiveness work directly to outcomes that matter.

Sessions will provide practical strategies for aligning local research and planning with systemwide initiatives, such as Vision 2030, Guided Pathways, and equitable hiring practices. Presenters will share approaches to integrating universal design principles, addressing office climate, and using planning as a lever for equity-driven institutional change. Inclusive and accessible planning processes help diverse stakeholders understand the evidence, choices, and implications well enough to contribute meaningfully. In daily practice, this may include using plain language, explaining unfamiliar measures, presenting information in multiple formats, and designing engagement activities that welcome different perspectives and levels of familiarity with institutional planning.

This track invites participants to engage with frameworks that bridge planning and research, explore systemic solutions, and leave with actionable tools to move their institutions forward.

Research alone doesn’t create change—how we apply it does. This track focuses on the real-world application of IRPE research to improve student outcomes and advance equity. Case studies, experiments, and process stories will highlight how colleges are using data to drive transformation in classrooms, student services, and campus culture.

Sessions in this track will embrace the value of “works in progress,” showcasing not just polished results but also the pivots, setbacks, and lessons learned along the way. Presenters are encouraged to share experiments in using new methodologies, incorporating student researchers into projects, leveraging emerging tools like AI, or aligning local research with statewide priorities. Sessions may explore clear data visualizations, intuitive dashboards, accessible documents, and audience-specific explanations that communicate context and limitations without requiring specialized research knowledge.

By focusing on the process of research in action, this track creates space for learning through experimentation, reflection, and iteration—reminding us that progress is often nonlinear but always valuable.

The work of equity and change is messy—and sometimes uncomfortable. This track provides open, facilitated discussions in which IRPE professionals can honestly explore the challenges that come with leading institutional change.

Topics may include navigating governance and politics, addressing resistance from colleagues or leadership, reflecting on positionality and bias, or grappling with failure and conflict. Conversations may also examine how jargon, unexplained data, assumptions about prior knowledge, and communication norms can limit whose voices are heard. Instead, how might we foster understanding by welcoming questions and offering different ways to participate so people can meaningfully engage with evidence and contribute their perspectives? Rather than avoiding hard conversations, this track emphasizes their importance in building authentic relationships, developing trust, and creating conditions for transformation.

“Real Talk” sessions are not about perfect answers—they’re about naming the tensions we face as individuals and as a profession, and learning from each other in brave, constructive dialogue.

Colleges increasingly serve students whose educational journeys do not follow a traditional, full-time, degree-focused path. Returning students, working students, career changers, students pursuing short-term or noncredit education, and other adult learners bring different goals, experiences, and constraints. This track examines what it takes to design accessible institutions around the realities of their lives.

Sessions may explore career technical education, noncredit programs, credit for prior learning, apprenticeships and work-based learning, flexible scheduling, reentry pathways, and connections between education and employment. They may also demonstrate how IRPE professionals use wage, employment, completion, transition, and program review data to understand whether programs are creating meaningful opportunities for students.

By connecting research, planning, workforce outcomes, and program improvement, this track invites participants to reconsider assumptions built around the traditional college experience. Presenters will offer evidence, strategies, and practical tools for creating more responsive pathways to learning, employment, economic mobility, and continued education.