Who presents at the AIR Forum?

And while I would have loved to go back further, the older conference guide PDFs and their session listings don’t actually list the home institution for presenters. I am not averse to putting together a scraping script on python to try to figure this out, but it seemed like too much work. So, after being unsuccessful with the wayback machine, and since Google retired its cached pages services, I decided to hit pause. Thus, I (and you my readers) are stuck at a two-year analysis of who presents at the AIR Forum, where they come from, and what I think the numbers reveal.

The analysis covers the 2025 AIR Forum (Orlando) and 2026 AIR Forum (Washington, D.C.). I extracted presenter affiliations from the full session listings for both years – core sessions and posters only, and standardized institution names to enable year-over-year comparison. I also built a searchable lookup tool that will let anyone examine presenter institutions across both years. So what we will be considering are:

• Presenter mentions: total occurrences of an institution’s presenters across all sessions (a three-presenter panel counts as three)
• Sessions represented: unique sessions in which the institution had at least one presenter (that same panel counts as one)

Together these gives us a good signal of volume and breadth. An institution with 10 presenter mentions but only 2 sessions represents a very different footprint from one with 6 mentions across 6 different sessions.

So what did I find?

Across both years combined, 281 unique institutions appear in the data, of which there are 172 higher ed institutions after I filter the rest out. In 2025, 254 unique individual presenters appeared across sessions; in 2026, it was 262. About 23% of presenters in each year appeared in more than one session.

Indiana University leads both years, with 22 presenter mentions in 2025 and another 22 in 2026. So that’s a total of 44 across the two conferences that I am attending/attended. No other institution comes close in numbers. Without needing to do further digging, I can posit that the likeliest reason this is so is because they are home to BCSSE/NSSE and thus gatekeepers of a treasure trove of national student data. Florida State University and Carnegie Mellon follow with 26 and 24 total mentions respectively. After that, the distribution shrinks: Ohio State (17), Dallas College (14), Missouri S&T (14), the University of Michigan (14), University of South Florida (12).

The top 10 presenting institutions account for roughly a quarter of all presenter mentions across both years. The 100 institutions in the lower half of the list each appear once or twice. The session listing is not dominated by the most famous universities, nor is it limited to large R1s alone. Community colleges, regional publics, system offices, private universities, national organizations, vendors, and consulting groups all appear. This is exactly what one should expect from a practical field whose work is the intersection of compliance, assessment, analytics, planning, accreditation, and strategy.

I have also spent some time considering the list and why an institutional researcher may decide to present (and reflecting on my own motivations as well). The presenter list should not be misread as a map or list of where the “best” institutional research work is happening or even where the most research is happening. I don’t believe it is a measure of IR quality or quantity – apart from Indiana or Carnegie Mellon, I won’t necessarily consider the other places doing more IR work than non-presenting institutions. Rather I think it is a confluence of many things – office culture, travel budgets, professional development support, staff time, proposal-writing experience, leadership encouragement, and whether the work itself can be abstracted and generalized to a wider audience. As part of higher education institutions that are dedicated to reaching and research, it is not unexpected that some IR offices might have made conference participation a part of the office’s responsibilities.

This is especially important when thinking about large, well-resourced universities that may be missing from the list, but may still have folks in attendance in the audience. I have come to learn that at some institutions, the work that AIR members would recognize as institutional research may not live in one central IR office. It may be spread across enrollment management, assessment, budget and planning, student success, college-level data teams reporting to deans, institutional effectiveness, and even faculty-led research centers. Their “IR work” may be excellent but dispersed and only one facet of their work identity. And in these settings, their connection to the IR community and research might be dwarfed by their connection to other academic and professional domains.

The continuity question

One of the more striking findings from the person-level analysis: only 31% of 2025 presenters also appeared in the 2026 program. That means roughly two-thirds of the presenting population turned over between years.

Some of that turnover is structural and expected, people present their project once, publish it, and move on. Unless you have made some substantive progress, it does not make sense to present the exact same thing again. Some of it reflects the realities of travel budgets and competing priorities, a degree of randomness and shake-up. But 31% year-over-year continuity also means the AIR Forum is drawing a genuinely new cohort of presenters each year, and hopefully new attendees too. For a professional association, I believe that’s healthy.

But it’s notable that in the two years, some of the more prominent presenting institutions are showing up in large numbers. Indiana, Florida State, Ohio State, Carnegie Mellon, Iowa Penn State. Dallas College, a large Texas community college system, appears with 14 total mentions across two years more than all the Ivies combined. I mention this because I attended one of their student success sessions last year, and it was one of the best ones I attended. And this is not a criticism of the Ivies either – it is a reflection of what I believe is the active IR practitioner community in general. Centralized IR offices that are tasked with all sorts of data and analytics responsibilities where they are resource-constrained and need to produce results.

The lookup tool below lets readers search for their own institution and compare 2025 and 2026 presenter presence – let me know if you find something else that’s interesting.

Rizwanur Rob is Assistant Director in the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment at Suffolk University. He is presenting “Measuring What Matters: A Program’s Financial Health” at the 2026 AIR Forum in Washington, D.C. This is the first of two posts on the AIR Forum. There may be a follow-up one after it’s over.