Staff
John Milam
Since the mid-1990s HigherEd.org's Founder and President, John Milam, Ph.D. has been extensively involved in helping the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) improve and redesign its IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data collection. He has held faculty, administrative, and institutional research positions at the University of Houston, West Virginia University (WVU), George Mason University (GMU), and the University of Virginia (UVa), where he worked as a Research Associate Professor before founding HigherEd.org, Inc. in 2002. He designed and built the GMU Data Warehouse, which housed extensive faculty and staff data, including faculty workload, salaries, and assignments. From 1995 to 2005, he provided the Web site Internet Resources for Institutional Research, which is now maintained by Association for Institutional Research (AIR) for the Institutional Research (IR) community.
Dr. Milam has written on numerous topics, including knowledge management (KM) using national datasets for faculty studies, using concept maps, virtual university models, assessing online education, and organizational learning. His research has also focused on faculty supply and demand models and affirmative action availability/utilization statistics for faculty hiring. These studies are available on this Web site's Knowledge Base. He also received the first NCES/AIR NSF Research Fellowship in 1996 to study Developing Benchmarks for Faculty Hiring (PDF, 1.2MB) which resulted in an AIR Professional File publication.
Dr. Milam served as a consultant to National Postsecondary Education Cooperative (NPEC) efforts from 1999 to 2004. He was part of the IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) redesign team — both the umbrella group and the human resource group which developed the Employee by Assigned Position Survey — and has served on numerous technical review panels. Dr. Milam brings many years of experience using IPEDS survey instruments and data and leveraging software tools for data analysis in institutional research and was one of the first to take advantage of new Web tools in the early 1990s. He served as Chair of the Association of Institutional Research's (AIR) Higher Education Data Policy Committee and on the advisory board of the ERIC (Educational Resources Information CLearinghouse) Clearinghouse for Higher Education, to which HigherEd.org provided Web hosting and technical support. As a faculty member at the AIR Foundations Institute, AIR Technology Institute, and AIR/NCES/NSF Summer Database Institute, Dr. Milam has helped train hundreds of institutional researchers in how to use the internet and various data tools. As founder of HigherEd.org, he has been able to focus even more intensely on leveraging technology to provide postsecondary data tools for use in decision-making at the federal, state, and institutional level.
John Milam curriculum vitae (PDF)
Andy Simpson
Senior member of HigherEd.org's development team, Andy Simpson, serves as team lead for all IPEDS projects. Mr. Simpson has four years of experience in web development and holds a Bachelor's of Business Administration with a concentration in Information Systems in Computer Technology from Shenandoah University in Virginia. Mr. Simpson's central contributions include leading the design, development, testing, and implementation of the IPEDS Glossary, IPEDS Dataset Cutting Tool (DCT), IPEDS Data Analysis System (DAS), and the IPEDS Executive Peer Tool (ExPT). He also has expert knowledge of the design and content of the IPEDS database.
Amy Golliday
Amy Golliday serves as the Database Administrator for HigherEd.org. She holds a Bachelor's of Business Administration degree with a major in Computer Information Systems from James Madison University in Virginia. She became a Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA) in 2003. Prior to joining HigherEd.org in November 2005, she worked as an ASP programmer coding SQL-based online transaction processing (OLTP) applications and then as a Database Administrator responsible for supporting and maintaining development and production servers for both her company and their clients. Since coming to HigherEd.org, Miss Golliday has been integrally involved in the TEAL II project, designing the database, analyzing requirements, engineering the application, creating and implementing the application’s business rules and data validation procedures, and testing the application. She also manages the company’s SQL servers and SQL backups.
Emily Bosacco
Emily Bosacco became a HigherEd.org team member in January of 2005. Starting out as an administrative assistant, she quickly excelled in the developer's role, working closely with the rest of the development team. As junior web designer, Mrs. Bosacco designed and now maintains the TEAL II web site. She also helps maintain HigherEd.org's web site and plays a leadership role in software testing to assure the quality of HigherEd.org's project deliverables.
