At its heart, NSSE is about facilitating the improvement of undergraduate education.

In the first installment of NSSE’s annual reporting of findings, Russell Edgerton of the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning and Lee Shulman of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching hailed the project’s launch as a “public unveiling of a new diagnostic tool” that had “tremendous potential.”

More than 20 years later, we have evidence of the sought-after improvements that animated the launch of this endeavor. NSSE has been administered at 1,680 institutions—90% of which have been repeat participants that see value in benchmarking against both peer institutions and their own past results, and setting new goals for continuous improvement. Groups of institutions have formed dozens of special-interest NSSE consortia—women’s colleges, Jesuit institutions, independent colleges, HBCUs, military academies, work colleges, and more—to ask additional, mission-specific questions of their students. Institutions belonging to more than two dozen state systems have shared findings and used results for system-wide assessment. All told, we estimate that some six million students have completed the survey, providing information for the benefit of their colleges and universities as well as for our ongoing research.

Yet as impressive as these participation numbers—one indicator of the project’s success—may be, from the beginning we clearly understood that NSSE would only live up to its promise if institutions were able to do three things: (a) recognize valid, diagnostic, and actionable information in their results, (b) take steps to change campus policy and practice, and (c) find evidence of improvement in subsequent NSSE results. We reflect on these three areas below.

Yes. NSSE data inform enhancements in policy and practice at participating institutions.

We have compiled more than 500 institution-provided examples of how engagement data support accreditation, faculty development, general education reform, and retention studies. The examples outline a wide range of uses across all campus types and offers suggestions about effective institutional practices. NSSE also provides toolkits that map the data to accreditation standards from the six U.S. regions and selected specialized accreditors, and provide timelines to help institutions decide when and how often to collect student engagement data.

For example, we recently wrote about how California State University Dominguez Hills is using sense of belonging results as part of its First-Year Experience program and how D’Youville College used results from the Academic Advising module to shape the advising model in its Student Success Center. Our Lessons from the Field series categorizes and documents such stories in detail.

Yes. Institutions have improved their engagement scores over time, and engagement has trended up.

An informative way to understand performance is to monitor change or stability in institutions’ results over time. After a decade in the field, NSSE found that many institutions were achieving measurable gains in student engagement, suggesting that campuses had engaged in systematic improvement efforts that paid off. Four in ten institutions with at least four NSSE administrations showed a steady trend of improvement in at least one measure for first-year students, and more than a quarter did so for seniors. Positive trends outnumbered negative ones by seven to one. Importantly, positive trends were not confined to certain institution types—we found positive trends at institutions large and small, public and private, research universities as well as master’s or baccalaureate level.

Last year we reported three long-term positive trends in engagement. Students spend more time on their studies, first-year students interact more often with faculty, and seniors have better perceptions of the campus environment than they did in the early to mid 2000s. For example, the percentage of first-year students who spent more than 15 hours per week preparing for class increased by more than 10 points. Likewise, over the same period the percentage of first-year students who interacted frequently with faculty about career plans, on course topics outside of class, and in activities other than coursework increased by more than 10 percentage points. The share of students reporting a substantial institutional emphasis on diverse interactions rose more than 10 percentage points for both first-year students and seniors.

Birthdays present opportunities not only for reflecting on one’s past, but on one’s future as well. In this section, we sketch a developing agenda for NSSE’s next decade, keeping in mind current higher education trends. This sketch is intended to focus our attention, and that of our institutional users, on what we believe to be important for collective consideration over the coming years.

Refining Student Engagement

As reflected in the introduction of NSSE’s conceptual framework, student engagement is a multi-faceted concept:

“Student engagement...is not a unitary construct but rather an umbrella term for a family of ideas rooted in research on college students and how their college experiences affect their learning and development. It includes both the extent to which students participate in educationally effective activities as well as their perceptions of facets of the institutional environment that support their learning and development.”

This broad definition raises at least one major question for consideration. Does it provide sufficient guidance for developing useful measures for the contemporary higher education environment? We believe it allows NSSE to evolve in sensible ways. Though NSSE’s primary emphasis has been on student behaviors and perceptions of the campus environment, it has the capacity to incorporate related constructs. For instance, a socio-emotional construct, Sense of Belonging, is now part of the survey. Whereas other surveys focus on psychological constructs, NSSE’s focus on behaviors and concrete experiences produces actionable survey results. This is consistent with NSSE’s founding ethos.

NSSE has long recognized the imperative to promote the success of historically underserved and underrepresented student populations. The questions on the survey, as well as the composite measures based on those questions such as our Engagement Indicators, bring attention to what matters for creating a positive learning environment and advancing the growth and development of all students. NSSE’s empirical foundation emphasizes the importance of time spent engaging in various behaviors linked to positive outcomes, such as student-faculty interaction, collaborative learning, quantitative reasoning, and communicating with diverse others. We believe these constructs remain important to measure, but they may not be sufficient on their own to support the success of minoritized students. Scholars have highlighted the barriers minoritized students face to fully engage in these areas. It raises one primary question we hope scholars and institutional participants alike can help us answer: What other engagement constructs can and should we measure that better address the experiences of minoritized students?

The Inclusiveness and Engagement with Cultural Diversity Topical Module complements content from the core instrument with additional information that bears on culturally responsive teaching and institutional support for students from diverse backgrounds. In recent years, one-fifth to one-third of NSSE participating institutions have chosen to append this module to the core survey, many of which have used the results to diagnose social justice issues on campus and take steps to remedy them. In addition, the core survey’s collection of demographic questions has evolved over time to incorporate or update questions about racial/ethnic identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability.

Online learning became ubiquitous in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Colleges and universities invested heavily in technology to help ensure a quality learning experience while many faculty pivoted to adapt the delivery of their courses. Results from NSSE Pulse from fall 2020 suggest that institutions appear to have navigated this unique environment well: 75% of the approximately 100,000 student respondents studying mostly online or in a hybrid capacity evaluated their entire educational experience highly (“excellent” or “very good”). Despite this good news, there is still much to learn about why some students did not have good experiences. More effort is also needed to understand how students succeed while studying online, often removed from the usual support infrastructure. Similar to the questions asked earlier about whether new constructs are needed to better support minoritized students, we should investigate further whether more focused constructs for online learning are needed to facilitate institutional improvement.

The new Experiences with Online Learning module will certainly offer institutions guidance for improving online courses. But more fine-grained information could be useful as well. For instance, developing a process for collecting a random sample of course-specific feedback for campuses could allow for more helpful diagnostic information. We already know that a subset of the items related to course structure and based on Quality Matters standards perform well from a validity standpoint, but additional composite measures specifically aimed at understanding online engagement may prove beneficial as well.