This paper firstly researches the ideological and political education in higher education institutions in the background of the big data era and puts forward the innovation strategy of ideological and political education mode in higher education institutions in the big data era. Secondly, it studies the application of data mining technology in colleges and universities for ideological and political education. Based on data mining technology, the data on ideological and political education is determined by the clustering algorithm, followed by a quantitative examination of the policy text of ideological and political education of colleges and universities by calculating the quantitative statistical analysis of policy text, word frequency, and word cloud analysis. Then, the research subjects were selected, and the initial data were obtained using questionnaires, further pre-processing, and further empirical analysis of ideological and political education based on data mining technology. The consequences show that the proportions contained in the three types of score bands, namely 17.99%, 59.38% and 9.96%, basically match with the sample proportions accounted for by the three types of grades assessed by clustering, namely 30.51%, 62.02% and 8.47%, which confirms that such a model of data mining adopted according to the quantitative table of ideologic and politic education assessment in higher education institution is a very successful model. This study contributes to the innovation of online ideological and political education work in higher education institutions in the context of big data.