Education Sector in the News

USA Today interviews Policy Director Kevin Carey for a story about NSSE, the student engagement survey that's helping to inform the national discussion about what matters in college.

Excerpt from "A Laboratory of Learning To Help Students Thrive":

"Along the way, it has helped reframe the national discussion about what matters in college. Two examples illustrate how:

• For years, accreditors (who decide whether a school meets quality-control standards and should be eligible for federal funds) have asked schools how many books they have in their libraries. NSSE asks students how many books they actually read.
• U.S. News & World Report bases 25% of its formula for ranking colleges on how college presidents, provosts and deans rate their peers. NSSE asks students whether their classes have them memorize facts or analyze ideas, whether they have attended an art exhibit, and how many 20-page papers they have written.

"Ten years ago, nobody was asking those questions," says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Universities.

NSSE is hardly the be-all, end-all for evaluating quality in higher education. It can't say, for example, whether students are writing good papers or retaining what they read. And Iowa State University professor Stephen Porter argues that NSSE and similar surveys aren't reliable, partly because students have problems correctly answering even simple questions about factual information.

But NSSE's influence can't be dismissed. Even Porter notes that it has become the "pre-eminent survey of college students." And in 10 years, Schneider says, NSSE has "helped drive a tectonic shift in our national priorities."

Colleges want to know how they stack up.

NSSE is not universally used, but clearly the concept has struck a nerve. It has inspired similar surveys for community colleges, law schools and high schools. It has spawned companion surveys of faculty and subsets of students. And versions are now being used or explored in Australia, South Africa and elsewhere. Many schools use custom-designed surveys of their own schools, too, but part of NSSE's appeal is that it enables schools to compare themselves with peer institutions. In that regard, NSSE is "probably the best thing we currently have available," says Trudy Banta, a professor at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis.

But few want to go public with their imperfections.

NSSE's early proponents hoped results would be made public, but "it became clear that NSSE would not likely survive and thrive if we reported scores," recalls founding director George Kuh. But as pressure grows on colleges to be more transparent, that is starting to change. Two years ago, for example, 257 colleges agreed to disclose their benchmark scores in a database published by USA TODAY; this year, 443 agreed. But with a few exceptions, comprehensive data on any one four-year school are hard to find. "NSSE shows that we can't rely on all colleges to voluntarily release information that might put them in a bad light," says Kevin Carey, a policy analyst for the non-profit Education Sector. ..."

Read more from the USA Today article "A Laboratory of Learning To Help Students Thrive."