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Welcome to AIM
The Office of Analysis and Information Management (AIM) produces reports and analyses for campus decision-makers to use in allocating resources, setting policy, and evaluating units and programs. The department also fulfills a second role—providing statistics, data, and information about UCLA to the public.
AIM is one of several institutional research (IR) units at UCLA. As part of the Office of Finance, Budget, and Capital Programs, AIM supports campus planning and evaluation by providing information to university decision makers about academic resources, activities, and outcomes. Our services include regular reporting to campus and external agencies, as well as analyses that focus on current topics of interest.
Academic Planning
AIM supports campus planning by providing standard and customized analyses to individuals and groups charged with making policy decisions and reviewing academic programs. The staff commonly work with end users to identify issues, determine the questions that need to be answered, and select appropriate data sources to be used in the analysis. AIM maintains its own historical database of enrollment and instructional activity, and can obtain data from other offices of record on campus. In addition, it can generate and enhance analyses using the results of student surveys that it conducts periodically. Recent examples of analytical support for campus clients include development of key academic indicators, comparison of planned and actual growth in each school and division, and utilization of large classrooms. More>>
Accountability
Accountability encompasses the responsibility to study and communicate to external and internal audiences whether the institution is accomplishing the goals it and the public have established. As a publicly funded university, UCLA has a number of interested parties to which it reports: students, their parents, the state Legislature and executive branch, federal funding agencies, and accrediting bodies. AIM has a dual role in this environment. It makes every effort to find and highlight accomplishments. But it also must maintain what the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the institution's primary accrediting agency, calls a "culture of evidence". That is, AIM needs to provide an ongoing feedback loop to the institution about processes that are working well and those that need improvement. More>>
Enrollment Planning
AIM has lead responsibility for support of enrollment planning at UCLA. It acts as liaison between systemwide enrollment planners at the Office of the President and local enrollment planning. Because state funding is tied to enrollment, projecting and reporting enrollment accurately is critical. AIM provides campus leaders with forecasts of continuing enrollment and analyses of various alternatives for shaping future enrollments to fit campus strategic goals. The alternatives may include varying admissions by headcount, level, term, or academic unit. The unit maintains an enrollment flow model that it uses for these analyses.
Student Outcomes
As part of the "culture of evidence" both students and faculty need to understand the process of education at UCLA. AIM provides information to support the evaluation of student access, experience and outcomes, primarily for undergraduate students. (The Graduate Division provides similar information about graduate students.) AIM maintains a longitudinal database that it uses to analyze undergraduate retention, graduation rates, and time to degree. These outcomes can be studied in relation to data gathered from the student record system and surveys. More>>
