NSSE's 20th Anniversary

Celebrating NSSE's 20th!

We are thrilled to commemorate twenty years of NSSE! Since its first national administration in 2000, more than 1,600 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions—from research universities to baccalaureate colleges—have adopted NSSE as an important component of their assessment programs.

NSSE has helped focus the national discourse about college quality on teaching and learning and has provided colleges and universities diagnostic, actionable data to inform the improvement of undergraduate education.

Here are just a few of the noteworthy accomplishments in NSSE’s history:

Over 5 million students surveyed
More than 600 accounts of NSSE data-informed institutional action
Since 2004, over 880 institutions have participated in a FSSE administration
Documented the benefits of “High-Impact Practices” in 2007
Confirmed that most of the variability in the student experience occurs between students within institutions, not between institutions

Read All About It!

Read about NSSE’s origin, achievements, and lessons learned in Assessment Update, March-April 2020, volume 32(2). Contributing authors included George Kuh, Peter Ewell, Alex McCormick, Jillian Kinzie, Keri Franklin, Charles Blaich, Kathleen Wise, and more.

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) at Twenty (Ewell & McCormick, 2020)

Twenty Years of NSSE Data Use: Assessment Lessons for the Collective Good (Kinzie & Franklin, 2020)

NSSE’s Quest for Quality: Seven Lessons in Designing a Better Survey (Gonyea & Sarraf, 2020)

The Road to Assessment Heaven Is Paved with Good Intentions (Blaich & Wise, 2020)

Assessment Update: NSSE at Twenty

Help NSSE plan its third decade!

To plan for NSSE’s 3rd decade, we are launching a series of listening sessions and activities to gather input from NSSE institutional contacts, administrative leaders, assessment and institutional research professionals, faculty and staff, and higher education scholars regarding current needs and concerns about undergraduate education and student success. We are eager for input on the following questions:

What aspects of student learning and success deserve further study?
What is on the assessment horizon?
What are anticipated campus and state data and reporting needs?
How should students be involved in assessment?

Kicking Off NSSE's Listening Tour

See what others have shared with us about emerging student populations, new forms of engagement essential to student learning, trends for assessment and evidence-informed improvement, and more on our blog, NSSE Sightings.

NSSE Sightings – Listening Tour

Record your feedback as we plan NSSE's future!

Click below to submit your feedback on a simple online form.

Record Your Feedback

Where are they now? Honoring 20 Years of Graduate Students in NSSE

Graduate students have always been an important part of the NSSE project. From NSSE’s humble beginnings with one graduate student in a cubicle in the Indiana University’s School of Education, to current operations involving more than a dozen graduate students, the project has benefited from the scholarly commitments and research orientation of graduate students. Graduate students are the backbone of project services, they coordinate BCSSE and FSSE survey administrations and analyses, contribute to report production, develop resources to support data use, give presentations and deliver webinars, and pursue independent and collaborate research projects, among other tasks. The NSSE project is proud to support graduate students in the pursuit of their educational goals and to see the influence of these talented students on the field of higher education.

The project has benefited greatly by their keen insights and dedication and we are forever grateful!