University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) officials in recent years created a minority mentoring program to connect students of color with business leaders in the community. The university recruited minority staff and students to work in its career center. It hired an adviser to work with minority student groups to ensure campus events reflected their interests.
All of these changes came about due to data—survey data that, for instance, revealed minority students were not taking advantage of the career services center.
“There were certain sub-populations on campus that felt marginalized,” says Dr. Nathan Lindsay, director of student life assessment at the University of North Carolina Wilmington that has an 11 percent minority undergraduate enrollment. “Students who are Native America and Asian consistently across several different surveys produced lower scores in terms of their satisfaction level with services, in terms of feelings of being included or represented. It gave us greater cause to address those things.”
UNCW is one of 1,400 institutions that have participated in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), the survey instrument that signaled the need for changes in the career services center to better meet minority students’ needs. Administered to first-year and senior students at universities that pay for it, the survey gauges to what extent students are participating in activities known to be effective best educational practices, such as a high level of interaction with faculty.
Founded 11 years ago, the NSSE program based at Indiana University has grown in size and influence. Its annual results are widely reported in the media. Researchers have used the data for a variety of studies. Also, it is one of the tools institutions can use as part of the Voluntary System of Accountability, an initiative among public four-year institutions designed to demonstrate transparency and good stewardship founded by the Association of Land-grant and Public Universities and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
“We have two overarching goals,” says NSSE director Alex McCormick. “One of them is to enrich the national conversation about college quality, which has been unreasonably obsessed with reputation and student test scores and pretty much bereft of any discussion about teaching and learning. Unlike other approaches that focus on outcomes, we’re focused on process. We know about what works. We go straight to the students and ask them about the extent to which they are involved in those practices.”
“Our other big goal is to use that information and feed it back to institutions in the form of diagnostic information on how they can reform,” McCormick adds. “We’re trying to encourage institutions to try to understand whom their least engaged students are and what we can do to improve their experience.”
