Middle-ish year UDRC update

Jeremias Solari, Assistant Director
April 28, 2021

Compass — Photo by Timo C. Dinger on Unsplash

This blog post comes near the middle of the calendar year — where does the time go?! We wanted to provide an update on some of the projects, enhancements, and initiatives that are active here at the UDRC.

Upcoming Research Projects

Two very exciting projects are very close to completion: student mobility and gender wage gap. The UDRC is looking forward to releasing these two research documents and their corresponding data narratives/data summaries. Please, look for these to be published in the coming months.

Cloud Migration

Progress on the cloud migration project continues. By mid-May, we will have all of our web assets on the new cloud platform, which is a significant accomplishment. Furthermore, two new developers have joined the team. These new developers will be focusing on constructing the matching and de-identification processes in the cloud-based platform. The next two months will be meaningful in the migration project as we should see the migration of these two core components into the cloud-based system.

Phase IV Legacy UDRC System

While the cloud migration project proceeds, the legacy “on-premise” phase IV system is now in production. We are working to process the historical data through the new phase IV system as I type this blog. Within the next two months, the new UDRC phase IV warehouse will be operational and in use. While this system should not see a tremendous amount of use due to the migration to the cloud, we are happy to announce that it is operational due to the migration to the cloud.

Potential Opportunities to Expand the UDRC’s Data Scope

We are always looking to expand the availability of data here at the UDRC. We believe that the scope of data at the UDRC is correlated with the quality of research that we can produce (think having demographic information versus not). The impact and potential public policy question space are vastly dependent on what and how much data we have. The flip-side of the coin is that integrating new data has high fixed costs. The UDRC is currently tracking opportunities to expand the data scope through receipt of support. More information to come in future blog posts.