College Planning Blog

Amidst concerns that college rankings have subverted the college planning process, a new tool is emerging that helps families find good college “fits.” On Monday, November 5, USA Today announced its plans to partner with the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to reveal institution-specific data that measures the levels of student engagement with their undergraduate experiences.

According to USA Today’s Mary Beth Marklein, NSSE “seeks to gauge the quality of an undergraduate education by looking at how actively involved students are with their studies, professors and the campus community” with the underlying premise that the “more engaged students are, the more likely they are to learn.” For consumers about to invest in four years of an undergraduate education, this is a good beginning point in identifying colleges that represent good fits for their students.

The NSSE survey employs 85 questions that address various activities common to most learning environments. As Marklein reports, “Research shows that these activities, while not direct measures of learning, are associated with student success.” Students are asked to reflect on their experiences in five categories each of which produces a benchmark for the institution that can be compared with the national average for similar types of institutions. Categories include the level of academic challenge, student-faculty interaction and the extent to which a college offers an active and collaborative learning environment.

By utilizing the NSSE surveys, college and universities are able to produce a powerful set of data that defines the learning experiences on their campuses–data that can help shape refinements to their respective educational programs while providing valuable insight to consumers about the relative health of those same programs.

This kind of transparency into the educational process is both welcome and needed. In its absence, consumers have had little choice but to try and tease meaningful insight out of the various college ranking guides. The problem with the NSSE initiative, though, is that only a fraction of the colleges and universities want to play. While nearly 1,200 schools (roughly one-third of four year institutions in the U.S.) have participated in the NSSE survey at least once since 2000, only 250 have agreed to reveal their scores in the guide that USA Today and NSSE are planning to publish.

In my opinion, there are a number of reasons for this. Chief among them are cost and risk aversion. Participating institutions pay NSSE anywhere from $1,800 to $7,800 (depending on enrollments and other factors) in order to have the survey administered to their students. While this may not be a line item for many operating budgets, I find it curious that quite a few institutions spend much more than the amount of the NSSE participation fee on an annual basis to burnish their images/credentials in the face of scrutiny from the ranking guides. The greater issue for many, however, may well be the unwillingness to take the chance that the survey results may not coincide with the rhetoric of their promotional campaigns.

Nonetheless, it is important that you, as a consumer of higher education, take stock of this opportunity to look past college rankings and become well-grounded in student-centered college planning. Whereas rankings are often used to justify the transaction, the NSSE data gets at the real substance and satisfaction associated with education. Rankings attempt to quantify the mythical pecking order among colleges; NSSE quantifies the learning experience within colleges. If families are to make good, student-centered decisions about colleges, NSSE provides a welcome perspective on the question, “What do we get for our tuition dollars?” One can only wonder why more colleges aren’t willing to open themselves to this type of assessment.

To read the USA Today story in its entirety, go to :
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-11-04-nsse-cover_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip