Higher Education Research Centers

This page previously listed 138 research centers, policy institutes, and international higher-education bodies collected in the early 2000s, with an emphasis on international and comparative education centers. A link audit found that all but a small fraction were dead, blocked from automated verification, or had been taken over by unrelated content. This page has been reduced to the organizations that could be confirmed active, organized by focus area.

Federal Research Infrastructure

• National Science Foundation. Federal funder of basic research, including education research.
• National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). NSF’s statistics arm; the original link here pointed to a discontinued survey report that NCSES has since archived.
• Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Resource Library. The Department of Education’s research and statistics arm, successor to the office that ran the data tool originally linked here.

Policy and Reform Organizations

• Education Commission of the States (ECS). Interstate compact tracking state-level education policy.
• National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE). Policy research comparing U.S. education outcomes internationally.
• Center for Education Reform. Policy and advocacy organization focused on school choice and accountability.
• Brookings Institution. Includes ongoing education policy research.

Institutional Research and Management

• National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS). Research and consulting on higher-education data and management systems.
• Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, Michigan State University.

Regional Educational Laboratories

The federal Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) network, originally more than a dozen labs, was consolidated and re-competed by the Institute of Education Sciences starting in the mid-2000s; several of the labs named on the original page no longer operate under their old names or independent status. Of those checked, these currently resolve to active, on-topic sites:

• McREL International (formerly Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning).
• North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL).
• SERVE Center, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (formerly a standalone REL).
• SEDL (Southwest Educational Development Laboratory), now maintained as an archive site.

International and Comparative Higher Education

This was the largest section of the original page by far, and also the hardest hit: of roughly 100 international center links originally listed, nearly all were dead. The centers below are the ones confirmed still active.

• Center for International Higher Education (CIHE), Boston College.
• CHEPS / STePS, University of Twente, Netherlands. Center for Higher Education Policy Studies.
• Faculty of Education, University of Malta.
• National Center for Postsecondary Improvement (NCPI), Stanford University. Preserved as a project archive.

University-Based Teaching and Policy Centers

• Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, University of Washington.

Additional National Organizations

The following returned a bot-verification wall rather than a checkable page, so their live status couldn’t be confirmed by automated means. They’re kept based on being well-established, active national organizations; verify directly if precision matters for your use.

• Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
• EDUCAUSE
• RAND Corporation (education research)
• Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP)
• Council for Aid to Education (CAE)
• Council of Graduate Schools (CGS)
• WestEd
• Public Agenda

See also

• Higher Education Organizations, for professional and sector associations.
• International Higher Education, for context on comparative and cross-border study.
• Higher Education Policy and Legislation, for the U.S. statutes this research informs.

A note on what was removed: several dropped links weren’t simply dead, they now resolve to unrelated businesses that acquired the expired domains, including a German bathroom-hardware manufacturer, an insurance content site, a domain marketplace parking page, a TV listings site, and a French-language tech blog. These domain takeovers affected organizations that were originally legitimate education research bodies. If you know the current, correct URL for a center dropped from this list, it can be checked and added back.