With this issue, the first of the new millennium, the Society enters its fifteenth year of continuous Internet publishing. Happy New Year to all of you who share our interest in facilitating integrated, comprehensive planning to inform higher education decision making. Three of the Society's regions are holding regional conferences in the next few months.
Regional conferences are wonderful, inexpensive, intimate professional development opportunities.
NPEC is a consortium of higher education institutions, associations, and Washington DC agencies devoted to developing better ways to use data for policy analysis. At its meeting in Washington DC in late November the program focused on moving from data to information to better decisions. Renee Lerche, director of Workforce Development at Ford presented material on workforce needs and the changing paradign among CEO's, followed by a panel discussing the implications of these changes for data and decision making. Concurrent sessions were devoted to the NPEC working groups reporting on their projects and soliciting input on priorities for future work. An interesting NPEC project is Answers, which provides a collection of data definitions used in the major national surveys, along with survey formats.