Institutional Studies

Staff Contact

The Office of Planning and Budgets (OPB) supplies reports and tools to university units that can be used in decision making and report generation, including:

• Cognos Business Intelligence Planning Profile Summary (PPS) Reports & Organization Structure,this section contains a PowerPoint Overview on the Cognos PPS reports and the three organization structures (Budget, Lead, and Duplicate). The PPS reports provide HR, finance, research, space and student trend data. The PowerPoint also discusses general navigation of the Cognos BI reporting tool.

• University Metric Tools, this section contains Excel workbooks that permit generation of selected planning profile summary elements. These can be used in lieu of the Planning Report Generator. (These are large files. Please be patient.)
• Planning Profile Summary (PPS), information used in the university’s planning process to show planning data element percent changes and values for five years for a selected unit or subunit.
• Planning Profile Summary Report Generator tool has been phased out. Please see Unit Data Report Templates and Graphs under University Metric Tools to create your own reports using a subset of data available in PPS.
• Profile Reports, including reports on headcounts of entering class and student profiles by semester. (These reports are available in OPB Cognos BI with the following link:

  Public Folders >OPB BI > OPB BI Lead >Entering Class Reports)

• Standard Reports, including reports on academic staff, budget, course capacity, degrees conferred, students, and student credit hours by university academic and non-academic units. (These reports are available in OPB Cognos BI with the following link:

  Public Folders > OPB BI > OPB BI Lead >OPB Standard Reports.)

• Common Data Sets, containing data produced in response to a set of standard questions and definitions developed from collaborative efforts of the higher education community and publishers such as College Board, Peterson’s, and U.S. News & World Report, frequently used for ranking and comparing undergraduate institutions:
  • Common Data Set, 2012-13
  • Common Data Set, 2011-12
  • Common Data Set, 2010-11
  • Common Data Set, 2009-10
  • Common Data Set, 2008–09
  • Common Data Set, 2007–08
  • Common Data Set Archives, prior years available here
• Course Load, Instruction, Funding, and Modeling System (CLIFMS)
  • Link to CLIFMS
  • CLIFMS Instructions (PDF)*, including information, updates, and a “how-to” manual. 
  • Professional Accomplishments (PDF)*, (Excel) (Word), a tool that can be used as a college and/or departmental aid in completing the Professional Accomplishments module in the CLIFMS database.
  • Data Sources and Uses (PDF)*

• Common Unit Codes

  • Look up a Common Unit Code (opens in new window)
  • Description of common unit code
  • View recent changes to common unit codes
• Publications and Presentations

*Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to read PDF documents.

*Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to read PDF documents.