We draw on NSSE data when reporting to the Kentucky Council for Post-Secondary Education about student engagement in learning and preparing our students for life and work and civic involvement.
Rodney B. Piercey, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Eastern Kentucky University
Public Reporting of Student Engagement Results
Prospective students, parents, the media, researchers, and others have expressed interest in seeing institutionally-specific NSSE results. Many NSSE institutions have made some or all of their results publicly available in some form (e.g. Web site, alumni magazine, press release). Others use NSSE primarily as a diagnostic tool for improvement. Some are triangulating the results with other data before deciding on appropriate communication strategies.
Related article: Risky Business: Promises and Pitfalls of Institutional Transparency. Change, September/October 2007.
NSSE's Position on the Public Reporting of Student Engagement Information
NSSE encourages public reporting of student engagement results in ways that serve to increase understanding of college quality and that support institutional improvement efforts.
Publicizing institutional results from the NSSE survey provides an opportunity to educate the public about the value of student engagement as an approach to assessing college quality. NSSE especially supports public reporting of student engagement results in ways that enable thoughtful, responsible institutional comparisons while encouraging and celebrating institutional diversity.
Although the decision to publicize NSSE results properly resides with the institution, NSSE endorses institutional transparency in ways consistent with the above statement.
As set forth in the NSSE Participation Agreement, NSSE does not make institutional results available to third parties. Institutions are free to share their results, as stated in the NSSE Participation Agreement. After thoroughly vetting the results, they are encouraged to:
- Focus on educationally meaningful indicators that are linked to student success in the context of the institution's mission.
- Provide a rationale for the choice of comparison groups so that others can draw their own conclusions about the merits of the comparisons.
- Explain the types of students, variety of behaviors, and institutional conditions the indicators represent as well as what can and cannot be concluded from them.
NSSE does not support the use of student engagement results for the purpose of ranking colleges and universities.
NSSE's National Advisory Board and the NSSE project sponsor, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, believe that reducing student engagement to a single indicator obscures complex dimensions of student behavior and institutional performance. For this and other reasons, numerical rankings are inherently flawed as a tool for accountability and improvement, whatever the information on which they are based. Such comparisons become even more problematic in the case of institutions that differ with respect to mission, resources, structural features, and student characteristics.