The Importance of Assessment, Especially in Challenging Times

As good as it is to know that the disruption to campus operations did not interfere with the reliability of NSSE results, a larger lesson from 2020 centers around the value of regular assessment of the undergraduate experience. Routinely collecting meaningful evidence about the student experience and then using that evidence to inform improvement initiatives is an ongoing imperative for higher education, made even more important during times of disruption such as we are now experiencing. It is vital to understand whether and how changes to operations—whether planned or imposed by external circumstances—affect our students and the quality of education they receive. NSSE results during these times can document resilience on the part of students, faculty, and staff while also pointing to opportunities for improvement.

Sense of Belonging

Our first story in this year’s release examines students’ sense of belonging, drawing on three items added to the core NSSE survey in 2020. We want our students to feel comfortable being themselves, to feel valued, and to feel part of our institutional communities. Belonging has both inherent and practical value, because it corresponds to student satisfaction and retention. It is also vitally important to examine belonging during a time of increased concern for racial justice in our society and on our campuses. I encourage readers to spend time with the interactive Tableau display accompanying the sense of belonging story, and NSSE users to examine what their data reveal about the extent to which different student populations feel like they belong.

The LRCs of Advising—Listening, Respecting, and Caring

What puts the impact in High-Impact Practices (HIPs) and do students have equitable access to their benefits? Our third installment of Engagement Insights focuses on these transformational educational experiences, exploring HIP participation over time, by major, and by student characteristics. We also feature new institution stories, a webinar, and an interactive Tableau display that enables users to explore our HIP data by selected student and institution characteristics.

This installment examines a special data collection on notions of trust—a critical factor that permeates student life and decision-making. The analysis conceives of trust in five categories—out-group trust, college trust, social institutional trust, media trust, and civil society trust—and finds that students of color consistently report lower levels of trust across all categories. Further analyses show Hispanic or Latino/a and White students expressed more college trust after COVID-19 disruptions while Black or African American students trusted less. Findings are complemented by a public Tableau dashboard to query the data by student characteristics.

Entering NSSE’s Third Decade

Our final installment recognizes NSSE’s two decades of continuous operation by first reviewing key accomplishments and findings, then looking ahead to future challenges and opportunities. From its inception, NSSE has been defined by an ethic of continuous improvement and innovation, much of it in partnership with our institutional users. Read about NSSE’s listening tour and the webinar on April 14, 2021, to help chart NSSE’s future!

As NSSE embarks on a third decade of documenting the quality of the undergraduate experience and facilitating evidence-informed improvement by participating institutions, I want to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of those responsible for the project’s continued success: the dedicated project staff, our National Advisory Board, our institutional users, and the millions of students who have generously shared their experiences with us and our users over the life of the project.