"We rely upon NSSE and FSSE data to encourage the campus community to take responsibility for student learning and engagement."
--Margaret W. Cohen, Associate Provost Emerita, University of Missouri–St. Louis
Since FSSE’s inception, more than 360,879 faculty members from over 924 colleges and universities have participated in the survey.
Take a quick tour of our new registration form and FSSE Interface in the Getting Started with FSSE video.
Description of the video:
Hi, everybody. My name is Allison BrckaLorenz, and I'm the director for both the College and University Teaching Environment, CUTE, and the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, or FSSE, assessment projects. If you're here watching this video, I assume it's because you're interested in registering for one or both of these projects, because our form has changed a little bit since the last time you may have seen it, I just wanted to record this quick little video to walk you through it and warn you of what's to come when you register. So first, we're going to identify your institution. But before we get any further, I want to say, make sure you have contact information for two different contacts at your institution. We'll require that. If you're registering for FSSE the faculty survey of student engagement, you'll also need an estimate of the number of faculty you intend to have us survey, that'll just be for a cost estimate. Then finally, you may want to preview our pricing information as well as our participation agreement online because we'll have you agree to having read those and to all of those terms. But to get started, we do want to identify institution. We have eligible institutions in this long list, and I suppose you could go search for it. But you can actually type in keywords. I'm going to pull up one of our test institutions here. But you'll find your institution in the list just to confirm that the institution that you pulled from the list is truly your institution and not say a similarly named institution. We'll just have you verify the IPEDs number or the ID number that gets pulled up. Type that in. And we'll try to confirm. There we give it just a second and here's where you're going to be able to choose which of the assessment projects you're interested in registering for. You can choose CUTE, which is an assessment of the environments and needs and supports for your faculty, or there's the FSSE, which is the companion to NSSE and an assessment of what your faculty are doing to contribute to student engagement on your campus. The registration forms are very similar, but FSSE is slightly more complicated because it includes that population file estimate, so I'm just going to register for this, but regardless of which of the projects, the registration is quite similar. As I summarized, you're going to need a couple campus contacts. You'll need the estimate for the number of faculty surveyed and that's for FSSE only, and you'll need to complete our participation agreement. Those three things are required for complete registration. Later, we're going to have options for you to do customization, choosing your modules, your timeline, different things about recruitment messages, uploading your population file. But those things aren't required quite yet. Just a preview of what's to come. The first thing that'll pop up is the campus project manager. This is the primary contact for your institution and where we're going to do most of our communicating with, so the person that will be making decisions, uploading the population file, things like that. This is the primary person that we'll send all e mail communications to. Now, if we do have information for CPM already for your institution on file, that information is preloaded here. But you do have the option to change who that contact is at this point or make any edits if there's anything you need to change about the information. So I am going to keep myself here as this contact for the CPM. Nothing I really need to change in my name, all my office, my mailing address. I will say our institution is going through the really frustrating act of changing all of our email addresses, so I will make a change to that. Instead of at indiana.edu, we are now at iu.edu, so I'm going to make that edit. But before you're done, it'll just show you again what the contact information is, so you can look over it and make sure everything looks okay. Go to the next one. Next, you'll have your campus administrative contact or the CAC. This is, think of this as a backup person. If we can't get ahold of the CPM, we'll contact the CAC, but they're only going to get a few of the contacts from us, just major contacts like registration and that the survey is about to launch. We won't contact this person much, but it is nice to have a second contact if we need to. The operation of this is similar. You're going to have your information prefilled if we've got that. Otherwise, you can add the information here, first and last name, making any edits that you need to. If you don't need to make edits, you can just skip through all of these. Here's my final information and I approve that. Great. The third contact that we might ask for that we will ask for, but you might not fill in is a billing contact. We will send the invoice for our projects to your CPM unless you give us a billing contact. This is optional if you have somebody else that you'd like us to send our invoices to. You can leave this blank. It is not required. But again, if we have information, it'll be pre filled. Otherwise, you can add a person or make edits to the person in this form. Approve. And then the final thing is a little bit new if you haven't registered for one of our projects in a while, because all of our reports and data are in these online dashboards, sometimes people want to be able to share that with other people, maybe in a presentation or something like that. If you have a shared office email address that you'd like us to give access to the data and results, we can do that. This again is optional. You don't need to do it. Your CPM and CAC will have access to the dashboards data and results, but if there is another person, and we would recommend a shared office email that multiple people can access. You can enter that here and we will make them an account. This is only true for a FSSE registration, but we do need a sample estimate. I'll just pretend that I have 125 faculty at my institution, that I intend to have you survey or have me survey, I guess. The reason we ask for that is so that we can calculate this cost estimate for you. There will be a cost estimate for CUTE as well if that's the project you're registering for, but it's not based on population file size, so we won't need that for an estimate. Final bit here is just to agree to the three parts of our agreement here that you have read our participation agreement, which is linked here if you need to take a look. You have two unique contacts. Please give us two different people for CPM and CAC because we do need that backup contact. Putting yourself twice is not that helpful. Then you also agree to our pricing and administration fees and our pricing structures here, including a refund policy if you end up having to withdraw. To go to the next page, you do need to agree to all three of those. That is the end. You're going to get an automated email from us after you've submitted with all of the responses that you've sent, and then we will be able to contact you, approve your registration, and get you to the next steps, customizing your administrations for both CUTE and FSSE. If you have any questions about any of this or any other aspect of our project, check out our websites or send us an email. We really look forward to working with you.
"We rely upon NSSE and FSSE data to encourage the campus community to take responsibility for student learning and engagement."
--Margaret W. Cohen, Associate Provost Emerita, University of Missouri–St. Louis
We are excited to introduce FSSE's new customizable pathways options for your 2026 administration. In order to give more flexibility to institutions to ask their instructional staff questions that are most important to them but keep costs low, FSSE is introducing a modular "a la carte" survey experience for 2026. In order to offer more flexibility as well as a speedier and more efficient way to calculate your costs, we've introduced a new pricing scheme as well. Your total administration cost for FSSE is now dependent on the number of people you ask us to survey, divided into broad ranges, and the number of content modules you would like in your customized survey.
Institutions that participate in NSSE and FSSE in the same year will be charged one $300 registration fee that encompasses both administrations. Beginning in 2022, the $300 registration fee for those participating in both NSSE and FSSE will appear on an institution's FSSE invoice.
Institutions that register for FSSE without NSSE will be charged $300 for registration, in addition to the fees outlined below.
Although dependent on sample size, the base FSSE administration fee includes 4 content modules. This could be the 4 content modules that make up the classic FSSE core, or it could be 4 content modules in any combination of the classic FSSE core, the classic Topical Modules, consortium items, or a selection of items from our partner assessment project the College + University Teaching Environment.
SAMPLE SIZE | COST (Includes Four Content Modules) |
---|---|
Fewer than 100 | $1,440 |
101-200 | $1,800 |
201-300 | $2,000 |
301-500 | $2,320 |
501-1000 | $3,000 |
1001-2000 | $4,480 |
2001 or more | $5,520 |
FSSE offers a variety of option for institutions to append additional item sets to their FSSE administration. Institutions can add items sets from FSSE's classic Topical Modules, consortium items, and item sets from our partner assessment project The College + University Teaching Environment. Although institutions can append as many additional content modules as they wish, we recommend not adding more than 2 (for a total of 6 content modules) given survey length and fatigue. Each additional content module beyond the given four as described above would be per the cost below.
SAMPLE SIZE | COST (Per Module Beyond the First Four) |
---|---|
Fewer than 100 | $180 |
101-200 | $225 |
201-300 | $250 |
301-500 | $290 |
501-1000 | $375 |
1001-2000 | $560 |
2001 or more | $690 |
FSSE may charge a fee to recover additional expenses such as processing late population file corrections.
Date of Withdrawal | Billable Amount |
---|---|
Prior to January 1 | $300 registration fee if FSSE-only |
Between January 1 - March 1 | $300 (plus $300 registration fee if FSSE-only) |
After March 1 | 60% of Administration Fee (plus $300 registration fee if FSSE-only) |
Q: In the cost tables above, what do you mean by "sample size"?
A: We're referring to the number of instructional staff that you plan to include in your population file. Because you are able to choose who you would like us to survey at your institution, we do not charge by the size of the population of students or staff at your institution. We charge by the number of people you ask us to survey, not the number of people who respond.
Q: We're not interested in creating a customized pathway for our FSSE administration. We just want "the usual" FSSE administration experience. What will that cost?
A: We have divided the classic FSSE core survey into four content modules. Because the Administration Fee table above includes four content modules, that would be the cost of administering the classic FSSE core survey (depending on your sample size). If you want to add additional content modules to the classic core (as you used to be able to add Topical Modules or consortium item sets), we would charge, per module, the cost in the second Additional Content Module Fees table above.
Q: So to be clear, what would I be charged if I want you to survey around 735 faculty with our usual FSSE administration plan: the classic FSSE core and two Topical Modules?
A: First, you will be charged a $300 registration fee. The classic FSSE core consists of four content modules. The base administration fee for 735 instructional staff (501-1000) would be $3,000. Each of the two additional Topical Modules would cost an additional $375.
The total cost would be $300+$3,000+$375+$375=$4,050.
Q: I've looked through all of the item sets available in the new Customizable Pathways options and have created our institution's wishlist. Just to make sure I understand the pricing, what would it cost to survey around 170 instructional staff with two of the class core content modules, one classic Topical Module, my institution's consortium item set, and one of the item sets from the College + University Teaching Environment project?
A: It sounds like you'd like a total of 5 content modules. First, you'll be charged a $300 registration fee. The base FSSE administration fee covers four content modules, so for 101-200 faculty that would be $1800. The fifth content module would cost an additional $225.
The total cost would be $300+$1800+225=$2,325.
Q: What if we really only want three of the content modules in our FSSE administration? Can we get a discount?
A: Not at this time, but do let us know if that's something of interest to you. We're currently not offering such an option, but we're open to the idea if there's demand for it.