Dr. Peter Dietsche is a Senior Research Scholar at EPI and Vice President, Research & Institutional Quality, at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario. He completed master's and doctoral work in psychology at McGill University and the University of Western Ontario, and earned a Ph.D. in Higher Education/Measurement & Evaluation at the University of Toronto. He has a strong interest in postsecondary student retention, organizational effectiveness, and institutional evaluation, emphasizing the impact of policies and practices on student educational outcomes in Canadian and US colleges.

In addition to his positions at EPI and Mohawk College, he is currently adjunct faculty with Central Michigan University and the University of Toronto, and sits on the Graduate Thesis Committee for the University of Toronto and the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Guelph. Dr. Dietsche recently held the position of principal investigator with the Pan-Canadian Study of College Students and, along with a group of Canadian educators, surveyed nearly 30,000 first-semester students enrolled in 114 colleges and institutes across Canada. His willingness to share his knowledge with educational administrators and faculty has made him an internationally sought-after consultant.

An educator and administrator for over 30 years, Dr. Dietsche is perhaps best known as the creator of the Freshman Integration and Tracking System (FITS), designed to provide timely and concise information to students, faculty, administrators and student services personnel. Initially paper-based, and now an interactive online questionnaire, FITS can assist students in choosing an educational path and college services based on real information, while it concurrently helps college staff identify self-esteem, career uncertainty or financial concerns among students early in their college experience. In just over a decade, FITS has become a critical factor in new student success at dozens of colleges and institutes and can predict with 80 percent accuracy who will quit their program by mid-term. Used in many Canadian colleges and throughout North America, FIT System information has also been highly valued by external groups such as secondary school counselors and administrators and public policy makers.