By Todd Simmons
A planning and research professional with nearly two decades of experience at two of the nation’s top land-grant universities has been named to lead institutional research operations at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.
Alexander C. Yin, Ph.D., will be N.C. A&T’s new vice provost for the Office of Strategic Planning and Institutional Effectiveness (OSPIE), part of the Division of Academic Affairs. OSPIE is the primary source of official data for the university, providing data and analysis for evidence-based decision-making and strategic planning throughout A&T.
Yin joins A&T from the University of Vermont, where he serves as assistant provost of Institutional Research and Assessment, a role he has held since 2016. Prior to that, Yin was a senior planning and research associate for Penn State, where he worked from 2005 to 2016.
“As America’s fastest-growing traditional research university, North Carolina A&T will benefit from strategic approaches to acquire, analyze and translate data to inform our Preeminence 2030 efforts,” said Provost Tonya Smith-Jackson, Ph.D., executive vice chancellor of Academic Affairs. “Dr. Yin’s breadth of lived experience engaging with stakeholders such as community members, students, alumni, faculty and staff positions him to be a significant contributor to A&T’s mission in an ever-changing higher education landscape. I look forward to his leadership.”
One of Yin’s most significant duties at Vermont was an analysis of data and academic analytics to help the university develop a strategic plan to attain R1-Very High Research Activity status in the Carnegie Classifications for Higher Education. A&T shares that aspiration, but is not as advanced in its planning process as Vermont, which lends his insight significant value.
Yin also served on the core committee that prepared Vermont for its reaccreditation four years ago and improved data processes in ways that dramatically increased productivity while significantly reducing costs.
At Penn State, a university of nearly 90,000 students, Yin was responsible for institution-wide data in such critical areas as faculty demographics, tenure issues, under-enrolled and special-topic coursework, access and affordability and student cohort analyses using the university’s data warehouse.
Yin holds a doctorate in higher education and a master’s degree in applied statistics from Penn State. He also holds a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering and a bachelor’s degree with highest honors from Georgia Tech.
