NSSE Accreditation Toolkits

NSSE Accreditation Toolkits provide suggestions for using NSSE results as evidence to support your institution's accreditation efforts with an emphasis on mapping student engagement results to regional and professional accreditation standards.

Accreditation Toolkits Information Sheet

Institutions Using NSSE for Accreditation

Centenary College of Louisiana

The process of developing its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) in support of reaffirmation by Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), offered Centenary the opportunity to further increase its emphasis on experience-based curriculum, particularly in a global framework. The QEP is titled “C4: A Quality Enhancement Plan of Experiential Learning,” where the four C’s are “Centenary, Career, Culture, and Community.”

Norfolk State University

Meeting AACSB standards in the School of Business at Norfolk State is a faculty-driven process. Feedback from students and campus stakeholders on the efficacy of the curricula as well as its delivery is collected to inform a comprehensive and multi-faceted process to assess course learning outcomes. The process has six objectives. NSSE results are used to support Objective #3, which aims to “understand the factors that help students learn more effectively and to succeed in school and at the workplace.”

Regional Accreditation Toolkits

Toolkits provide suggestions for mapping student engagement results to regional accreditation standards. We also offer sample timelines to help you decide when and how often to collect student engagement data for integration into your accreditation process. Finally, we offer examples of how other institutions in your region have used NSSE in their accreditation efforts.

HLC: Higher Learning Commission
MSCHE: Middle States Commission on Higher Education [revised standards adopted 2014]
NECHE: New England Commission on Higher Education
NWCCU: Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities
SACSCOC: Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges
WSCUC: WASC Senior College and University Commission
View Map of Regions

Specialized Accreditation Toolkits

Guidelines map NSSE survey items to professional accreditation standards related to specific areas of specialized study.

ABET: Applied Sciences, Computer Science, Engineering, Engineering Technology, Information Systems
Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB): Business , Accounting
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE): Teacher education
Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) Standards

Comments about the Accreditation Toolkits

"I liked the idea of the Accreditation Toolkit in which NSSE questions are linked to the Middle States standards. I plan to develop this theme on my campus and involve NSSE data in accreditation reports.

I liked the presentation about the NCA accreditation visit because it gave me a real example of what the school needed to work on, and how it used NSSE data to improve. When we are up for accreditation in the next couple of years, I can use NSSE data to look at those same areas and see how our campus is going, and what, if anything, needs to change.