Expanded History of the IU Center for Postsecondary Research

Expanded History of the IU Center for Postsecondary Research

An abbreviated history of the Indiana University School of Education (SoE) was published in late 2023 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the School (Leiber, 2023). We use this opportunity to expand on the history of the Center for Postsecondary Research (CPR) and provide more context on the 100th anniversary book. 

Introduction

The Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research (CPR) is a non-degree granting unit of the Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) School of Education (SoE). Its founding mission was to conduct high quality, innovative inquiry to answer critical questions about student success and educational effectiveness that would inform policy and practice and further institutional improvement. 

CPR is independent from the Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) graduate programs but maintains close connections with HESA. The director is always a tenured HESA faculty member, and all of the funded research projects secured by HESA faculty are housed in CPR. The list of CPR Directors is listed in Appendix A. The vast majority of students working at CPR are enrolled in a HESA doctoral program, though CPR based projects occasionally employ students from other IUB graduate programs. This document summarizes the beginnings of CPR and traces its evolution from an aspirational concept to large, vibrant research and development organization working on a mix of multiple continuing cost-recovery projects and externally funded projects and activities.

The Beginnings: 1970 to 1997

Conversations about creating an entity at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) that would bring together campus resources to engage in institutional research and policy studies started in the late 1970s. At the time, several IU School of Education (SoE) faculty including Dr. Glenn Ludlow* and Dr. Rick Pugh* were serving in campus administrative positions and a cohort of research-oriented faculty such as Dr. George Kuh were being hired. Included in these discussions was Dr. David Clark*, former IUB SoE Dean and then a faculty member teaching in both the higher education and school administration doctoral programs.

Dr. Don Hossler joined the HESA faculty in 1985 and in 1988-89 he and Kuh made a series of overtures to the then 15th IU President, Tom Ehrlich, suggesting the need for a research and development enterprise squarely focused on contemporary problems and challenges facing colleges and universities. By that time, IUB had attracted a strong pool of research-oriented HESA faculty who would contribute to the effort, augmented by some highly capable IUB personnel working in institutional research, the budget office, and other areas. Ehrlich thought the concept had merit but did not provide start-up funds. However, he encouraged Hossler and Kuh to pursue the idea. 

Hossler and Kuh continued to talk about the prospects for a center and discussed the notion with colleagues. Several major research activities kept the concept alive in their minds, such as Kuh’s Lilly Endowment funded College Experiences Study culminating in his Involving Colleges book (Kuh et al., 1991) and a host of related publications, and Hossler’s College Board activities. 

In 1994, Dr. Robert Pace*, a professor from UCLA transferred the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ) to Kuh and IUB. The CSEQ was an elegant but long paper questionnaire with excellent psychometric properties designed to capture the quality of the undergraduate experience. Its genius was carefully crafted “quality of student effort” scales. The expectation was that graduate students would use CSEQ data to further their research capabilities and conduct dissertation research and other inquiry activities. As we shall see, the transfer of the CSEQ to IU paid major dividends just a few years later in the form of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE).

1997-2002: The Startup Years

CPR was not officially recognized as a university entity until 2003. However, a locus of organizational energy began to “act” like a center several years earlier. In 1998, Kuh was selected by Dr. Russ Edgerton*, the Education Officer of Pew Charitable Trusts, to conduct two field tests of what was then called the College Student Engagement Survey, a questionnaire developed by a design team led by Peter Ewell at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. (NCHEMS). Kuh was a member of the design team.  The two feasibility studies were done during 1999 under a $300,000 contract with NCHEMS which Pew funded to do this work. The goal was to create and administer a research instrument that generated actionable data institutions could use to assess and improve the quality of the undergraduate experience. It was intended to be a counterpoint to the annual U.S. News College Rankings which produced a distorted view of collegiate quality by featuring institutional resources as contrasted with what students did with those resources to aid their learning and personal development (Kuh, 2013).

After the successful field tests, the College Student Engagement Survey was renamed the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), and Kuh and IU were awarded a three-year $3.3 million implementation grant from Pew to support the first three annual national administrations of NSSE. One of the reasons IU was awarded this project was because Kuh and his colleagues had experience with the aforementioned CSEQ and about two thirds of the original NSSE items were based on CSEQ items. Also, the proposed project subcontracted with the IU Center for Survey Research (CSR) to administer the instrument; CSR was a widely respected professional survey research organization led by John Kennedy. CSR was and continues to be an indispensable NSSE and CPR partner and ally.

Because of its national scope and fee-for-service model, NSSE required a finance manager, research analysts, office personnel to handle inquiries and other matters, a renewable pool of doctoral research assistants, and ample space to pursue its mission and realize its ambitions. With 276 schools in 2000, 321 schools in 2001, and 367 schools participating in 2002, the demand for NSSE was greater than originally estimated. 

In three short years, NSSE obtained data from 265,000 students at 617 different colleges and universities, which made NSSE one of the largest national databases on undergraduate experience. The demand for NSSE was driven in large part by increased pressure by accreditors and states for institutions to provide evidence of student learning and document institutional effectiveness. Equally important were testimonials by national experts and institutional researchers about NSSE’s high quality products and services, especially the actionable results highlighted in user friendly formats that were continuously improved. The endorsement of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching likely helped spur enthusiasm for the project as did the imprimatur of the NSSE National Advisory Board of higher education luminaries (National Survey of Student Engagement, n.d.). Finally, with systematic intentionality, from 1999 through 2001 Kuh joined by Peter Ewell from NCHEMS went to literally dozens of regional and national higher education meetings to introduce and talk about what NSSE was and why it was important. 

During these and later years, NSSE produced a comprehensive, widely distributed annual national report which helped attract media attention (National Survey of Student Engagement, n.d.). At the urging of Bill Tyson, NSSE’s media relations consultant, Kuh wrote multiple op eds and spoke with reporters at national and regional newspapers and magazines to reach a wider audience about the NSSE story and the importance of student engagement to student success. NSSE staff made scores of NSSE-related presentations based on NSSE data, often involving people from NSSE-user institutions to testify to the quality and utility of NSSE results (Kuh, 2013). NSSE staff also began to publish papers using NSSE data in multiple industry outlets, occasionally with colleagues such as Dr. Ernest Pascarella* from the University of Iowa (e.g., Kuh & Pascarella, 2004), Dr. Gary Pike from Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) (e.g., Pike & Kuh, 2005), and Dr. Shouping Hu from Florida State University (Hu, Kuh, & Li, 2008). 

In the first few years, CSR used the U.S. Postal Service to mail hundreds of thousands of NSSE questionnaires to students around the country. This made CPR the second largest campus user of US mail services; the IU Alumni Association was the top user. By 2002, the overwhelming majority of NSSE questionnaires were administered via WWW, thanks to pioneering work done by Kennedy and his CSR colleagues because at that time no survey center had developed the software to run a national survey at the scale required by NSSE.

Thus, so it was that the NSSE organizational infrastructure evolved into the CPR backbone, a development accelerated by NSSE’s success in attracting more institutional subscriptions for the annual survey than was predicted. By 2002, this resulted in a non-trivial amount of unexpended revenue which Pew allowed NSSE and IU to use for NSSE related activities, one of which was to expand and deepen the infrastructure to support a large growing fee-for-service enterprise. The NSSE cost recovery model put it in a special category of IUB research and development projects which resulted in the campus deciding that NSSE should be allowed to operate as an academic auxiliary, similar to the IU bookstore. On balance, this was beneficial for NSSE though it created some minor problems in accounting and reconciling CPR and School of Education budgetary expenditures for graduate student fee remissions and operating expenses unique to auxiliary functions.

The $3.7 million in grants from Pew Charitable Trusts to establish NSSE drew attention locally as did the national rollout of the survey in 2000. To be officially recognized as a Center requires approval by the IU Trustees. It took about a year, but in 2003 the Trustees formally approved the CPRPP (the name was changed to Center for Postsecondary Research (CPR) during the approval process), with the CPR reporting line through School of Education Dean’s office. 

For the 1999 field tests, NSSE’s staff consisted of Kuh and Dr. John Hayek, a .5 graduate research assistant majoring in higher education, with CSR contracted to administer the survey. Within a few months, Hayek became a full-time staff NSSE member. His most recent work prior to doctoral study was with youth soccer in Florida, where he did a variety of things including marketing. This turned out to be very important, as it was second nature for Hayek to be constantly thinking of ways to make NSSE visible, useful, and memorable, while Kuh concentrated on how to ensure data quality and legitimacy in the academic community. In retrospect, Hayek and Kuh were a strong, complimentary team for a fee-for-service start-up in higher education. Hayek’s entrepreneurial instincts and administrative acumen were exactly what NSSE needed to prosper in the early years (Kuh, 2013).

NSSE Institute for Effective Educational Practice. The NSSE Institute was created in 2002 and formally approved by the IU Trustees in 2003. The primary reason for creating the NSSE Institute was that – as odd as it may sound -- institutions needed help in learning how to best use their results (Gonyea & Kuh, 2009; Hossler, Kuh, & Olsen, 2001a, 2001b). Since then, with ongoing leadership from Dr. Jillian Kinzie, the institute has engaged in a variety of projects and partnerships to help faculty, administrators, and governing board members effectively link information about student experiences and devise practical approaches to improve academic programs and support services. A second, pragmatic reason for the Institute was to keep the budgetary lines clear and separate between income derived from NSSE institutional participation fees and external grants and contracts for research and consulting. For example, for internal bookkeeping purposes, the grant to support the DEEP initiative described later, and the royalties from its products are assigned to the Institute, and this income is used to underwrite R&D activities, support staff and graduate student travel, and other activities consistent with the Institute’s mission. 

Governance, Staffing and Space. By some standards, the CPR governance structure was rudimentary. Daily duties were handled by the office manager, and planning, policy development, project supervision, and other operational decisions were managed by the “A Team” made up of the CPR Director, the NSSE Director, CPR Assistant Directors, the budget and finance officer, and office manager. The “A Team” met regularly as well as on an as-needed basis.

By 2002, the NSSE staff, including the NSSE Institute, included eight full-time professional staff, nine graduate assistants, and a fluctuating number of hourly student employees. In addition to Kinzie, two other professional staff from the start up years continue to do excellent work at CPR and NSSE, Robert Gonyea and Shimon Sarraf. The continuity, leadership and quality contributions these three professionals provide NSSE and CPR cannot be overstated. 

Outstanding data analysts are always in demand, and NSSE and CPR have been fortunate to attract their fair share. Dr. Robert Carini, then an IUB sociology doctoral student, was the first such hire by NSSE in 2000 followed by Dr. Paul Umbach. Both went on to faculty positions after their time at NSSE. CPR also received advice and support from faculty associates, among them Hossler, Dr. Doug Priest from IUB, Dr. Trudy Banta, and Dr. Nancy Chism from IUPUI.

Suitable work and office space are always in high demand on college campuses. What became NSSE started in the W. W. Wright Education Building but because more space was soon needed, NSSE moved to the Smith Research Center at 10th and the Bypass, then to Ashton Aley, a cinder block building on the north side of 7th Ave across from the Education Building. Soon after, CSR joined CPR/NSSE in an adjoining cinder block Ashton structure. Obviously, proximity for the two partners, CPR and CSR, was a boon to their productivity. 

Building Up from the Foundation: 2003 to 2010

This period in CPR’s evolution continued to be heavily influenced by NSSE along with several other major projects. In short order, three NSSE spinoffs appeared: the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE), the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE), and the Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement (BCSSSE)BCSSSE). Like NSSE, all three are self-supporting using a fee-for-service cost recovery model.  A few words about each.

FSSE. The idea for FSSE came from Dr. Robert Smallwood, who was a faculty member and Assessment Director at what was then Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University San Marcos). Smallwood took an early interest in NSSE; in fact, his institution took part in the first NSSE field test in 1999. He also hosted one of the first NSSE user workshops in San Marcos in 2001. Smallwood was convinced that if a version of NSSE could be adapted for faculty members, the engagement constructs, and language would be easier to communicate and over time would cultivate more faculty interest and enthusiasm for the work. Smallwood helped create a FSSE beta version with help from Kuh and NSSE staff, one of whom was Judy Ouimet, a NSSE research analyst who later left CPR to help the Community College Student Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSSE) during its start-up years. The first national administration of FSSE was in 2003. Umbach, a NSSE research analyst, took over the FSSE; Dr. Thomas Nelson Laird, who was hired as a NSSE research analyst and later became a faculty member in the HESA program, assumed leadership for FSSE when Umbach left.

LSSSE. Surprisingly, the idea for LSSSE came up after a brief presentation about NSSE at the December 2000 meeting of the American Council of Education Secretariat, the group of Washington-based higher education associations. Dr. Carl Monk, then-Executive Director of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), asked if the engagement ideas would apply to law school education. The seed was planted, but the NSSE board discouraged doing anything in the near term, as NSSE needed to focus on establishing its reputation and brand. However, a NSSE graduate research assistant pursuing a joint J.D./Ph.D. degree, Dr. Patrick O’Day, was enamored with the idea of a law school student engagement tool and mentioned it to some IUB law school faculty. Within days, the then Dean of The IU Maurer School of Law, Lauren Robel, was ready to administer a law school student engagement survey; the only problem was it had not yet been developed! Several months later, after consultations with IU law faculty and staff, the beta version of what became LSSSE was administered to IU law students (Kuh & O’Day, 2022). The first LSSSE national administration was in 2003. Lindsay Watkins became LSSSE Project Director after O’Day left to begin practicing law. Carole Silver, an IU law professor, became LSSSE Director when Kuh retired in the summer of 2010 and by 2012, 178 accredited law schools in the US (82% of the total) had used LSSSE at least once.

BCSSSE. BCSSSE collects data about entering students' prior academic and co-curricular experiences, as well as their expectations for taking part in educationally purposeful activities during the first college year. The BCSSSE idea was prompted by the fact that Kuh and colleagues in the mid-1990s developed the College Student Expectations Questionnaire (CSXQ) as a companion tool to the CSEQ. Institutions that administer BCSSSE to their first-year students entering in the fall can pair their BCSSSE results with a NSSE administration at the end of the first college year to get an in-depth understanding of first-year student engagement and target students whose plans for how they will spend their time fall short of what will lead them to succeed. Work on BCSSSE started in 2004 and the first national administration was in 2007. Dr. Ty Cruce, a NSSE research analyst, led the development of BCSSSE followed by the current BCSSSE Director, James Cole.

HIPs. Another NSSE-related initiative that is now part of the higher education lexicon is high-impact practices or HIPs, which are enriching pedagogies that make a substantial contribution to student learning and success. In 2005, Kuh asked the NSSE analysts to examine the relationships between items of what was called the Enriching Educational Experiences (EEE) cluster on the original NSSE and other engagement scales including the self-reported gains items. The EEE cluster items asked student whether they did one or more of the following during their time in college:

  • Learning community
  • Service learning or community-based project
  • Study abroad
  • Research with a faculty member
  • Writing intensive course
  • Internship or field experience. 

It turned out that students who did one or more of these were far more engaged and more likely to persist and graduate than their peers who did not have such experiences (Kuh, 2008). Moreover, students from historically underrepresented groups who did one or more HIPs realized a boost in their performance. These engagement and outcomes patterns persisted every year since.

NSSE Institute. The NSSE Institute was and continues to be quite active with grant-funded initiatives and other activities (National Survey of Student Engagement, n.d.). The first was supported by a $1.3 million grant from The Lumina Foundation to conduct extensive case studies of 12-15 “high performing” four-year colleges and universities. These institutions had higher-than-predicted scores on the NSSE benchmarks and also higher-than-predicted graduation rates. Dubbed Project DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practices), its goal was to discover how these schools achieved this measure of effectiveness (e.g., policies, programs, practices, culture). With additional support from the Lilly Endowment funded Wabash College Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, DEEP also was able to learn about effective educational practices at a set of high performing liberal arts colleges (National Survey of Student Engagement, n.d.). This major project resulted in the widely cited 2005 book, Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That Matter and many related articles and chapters.

During 2003-07, the Building Engagement and Attainment for Minority Students (BEAMS) project supported data-based campus change initiatives using NSSE results at more than 100 four-year Minority Serving Institutions. The Lumina Foundation awarded a $5 million grant to the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) with $150K per year subcontracted to CPR. The project resulted in ten practice briefs and other publications that focus on aligning multiple campus initiatives, campus leaders' support, co-curricular activities, collecting survey data for assessment, engagement among campus constituencies, faculty development, first-year programs, student support services technology, and writing across the curriculum (Bridges, Cambridge, Kuh, & Leegwater, 2005; National Survey of Student Engagement, n.d.).

Other CPR Projects. Not every CPR activity during this time was NSSE related. For example, from 2005-2011, Hossler directed a series of studies funded by the College Board ($798,000) on student retention focusing on: (1) how students’ background characteristics, academic performance, and public and institutional financial aid influenced student success at four-year colleges and (2) how two- and four-year colleges organize to enhance student success.

HESA professor, Dr. Edward (Ed) St. John, led the Indiana Project on Academic Success (PAS), a large practice- and policy-oriented research project funded by Lumina Foundation with particular emphasis on factors that influence access to and persistence in higher education. Hossler was the PAS associate principal investigator and became PAS Director when St. John left for a faculty position at the University of Michigan. Between 2003 and 2015, Hossler along with HESA professor Dr. Vasti Torres and research scientist Dr. Mary Ziskin, secured research funding from Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, Canada, Robert Woodruff Johnson Foundation (Hossler & Price, 2014), the College Board (Hossler, Ziskin, Lucido, Dadashova, & Zerquera, 2011), National Association for College Admission Counseling, and the Spencer Foundation (Hossler, Ziskin, Gross, Kim, & Cekic, 2009). Total funding over this time period for PAS was approximately $3 million, which among other things supported five graduate students. 

Especially impactful was the work Hossler and PAS colleagues did to help frame and write a series of Lumina-funded National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Signature Reports. NSC is the only national database that allows policy makers and researchers to track students’ postsecondary educational outcomes, including persistence, graduation and receipt of postsecondary certificates by student major and many other variables. NSC Signature Reports have become the most timely and insightful trend reports the nation has to examine postsecondary enrollment, transfer, and persistence patterns across the nation, by states, and institutional sectors (see for example Hossler, Shapiro, Dundar, Chen, Zerquera, Ziskin, & Torres, 2012 Winter); Hossler, Shapiro, & Dundar, 2012). Hossler left PAS in 2009 to be the founding Executive Director of the NSC Research Center, at which time Torres became PAS Director. Hossler returned to direct PAS in 2013 when Torres was named the Dean of the College of Education at the University of South Florida. Here is an unannotated sampling of other CPR projects and funders during this period:

  • 2001-2005 Post Master’s Certificate Program (Association for Institutional Research/National Science Foundation)
  • 2004 Connecting the Dots (Lumina and Wabash College Center)
  • 2004-2006 National Postsecondary Cooperative Student Success in College project (US Department of Education)
  • 2005 and 2007 Evaluation of assessment grant program and approaches to measure deep learning (Teagle Foundation)
  • 2008-2012 Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (Surdna Foundation, Houston Foundation, Cleveland Foundation, Barr Foundation, Education Foundation of America, National Endowment for the Arts)
  • 2008-2018 National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) with University of Illinois (Lumina, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Teagle Foundation)
  • 2009 The Mobile Working Student in Northwest Indiana (Lumina)
  • 2009-2011 The Effects of Student, Institutional, and Public Policy Factors on Postsecondary Participation and Academic Success (Spencer Foundation)

Operational Notes: The growth of NSSE and its sibling student engagement surveys along with other projects generated a substantial amount of CPR revenue. According to Marilyn Gregory, the superb CPR business and finance manager, between 1999 and spring 2012 CPR generated just over $52,000,000 in the form of institutional participation fees and external grants and contracts for its various projects. All this was carried out without any budgetary investment by Indiana University, other than a one-time waiver of project space rental as part of negotiated overhead cost agreements between the university and funding agencies.

As NSSE and the number of other CPR projects grew and added staff, another move was necessary, this time from Ashton Aley Residence Hall to the fourth floor of Eigenmann Residence Hall at the corner of 10th St and Union. Later, CPR was assigned added space on the 7th floor of Eigenmann to accommodate personnel with new CPR projects. In 2010, there were 20 full-time and 16 part- time staff working at NSSE, with another half dozen working on other CPR based projects. 

Although there was not much Center-wide discussion about what CPR stood for and how it functioned, the enacted values and operating philosophy of CPR essentially mirrored those of NSSE. Newcomers learned less about what was expected and how to behave from oral declarations and written documents and more through observing who did what and how things were done. On occasion, the NSSE National Advisory Board requested planning and update documents from Kuh and his colleagues. From those documents the following values and industry leading standards stand out:

  • Quality
  • Responsiveness
  • Reliability
  • Productivity
  • Continuous improvement
  • Utility – we want to make a difference!

CPR’s overriding goal during this period was to sustain and selectively expand current operations at the highest level of quality and to be open and encouraging to undertake or add new initiatives and staff with complementary goals and values.

In 2007, Kuh announced his intention to retire from IU in a few years and with the endorsement of the NSSE National Advisory Board and approval of the SoE Dean a national search began for Kuh’s successor as NSSE Director. In January 2008, Dr. Alex McCormick of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was appointed as an associate professor of HESA and NSSE Director. McCormick was familiar with NSSE having served on the inaugural NSSE Technical Advisory Panel. Kuh continued to direct CPR until his retirement from IU in August 2010 at which time Professor Torres became CPR Director.

NSSE celebrates 10th anniversary with a celebration and symposium in Indianapolis - 2009.  “Student Engagement and Educational Quality: An Agenda for the Next Decade”  This one-and-a-half-day program, beginning at 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 24, 2009, brought NSSE founders and leading scholars, practitioners, and policymakers together for a series of talks, interactive panels, and presentations, concluding with a celebratory dinner banquet on Sunday evening, October 25, 2009.

2010 LSSSE appoints first legal scholar director following George Kuh retirement (Carole Silver named LSSSE director).

NSSE critiqued at ASHE Fall 2010.

2011 – Present: Refreshing Student Engagement

Hossler succeeded Torres as the head of CPR during the years 2013-2015 when he retired. Hossler grant -- 2011-2014 National Student Clearinghouse Signature Reports and Data Enhancement Project was an ongoing research relationship with the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Research Center analyzing NSC data and producing student enrollment patterns research reports. Below are the grants and contracts obtained from CPR.

Borden, V. M. H. (June 2022). Transition of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to ACE. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. June 1, 2022 through June 30, 2023. $55,000.

Tran, A. and Alemneh, T. (co-PIs). (September 2021) USAID Partnership for Higher Education Reform (PHER) in Vietnam. Five-year initiative to modernize Vietnam's leading universities and strengthen Vietnam’s higher education system in alignment with USAID's Higher Education Program Framework. $14.2 million (Project supported 2 graduate assistants at CPR and paid between .25 and .50 of my salary). Technically, I am the projects Senior Academic Advisor, Lead expert for IQA and co-Lead for MIS.

Indiana University President and Board of Trustees (September 2020). Expanding Indiana’s Educational Attainment Pipeline. Funded proposal to the Lilly Endowment, Inc. Charting the Future for Indiana’s Colleges and Universities Phase 2-Implementation. Lead proposal writer and coordinator on behalf of Steering Committee (Lauren Robel, Exec VP and Provost, IUB; John Applegate, Exec VP Univ. Academic Affairs [EVPUAA]; Nasser Paydar, Exec VP and Chancellor, IUPUI; Kathy Johnson, Exec VC Academic Affairs, IUPUI, Venkat Venkataramanan, Vice Provost Finance, IUB, Sarah Booher, Chief of Staff, EVPUAA). $5,000,000. ($1,000,000 was managed through CPR, but money from all accounts supported a team of up 8 graduate assistants in CPR for three years.

Borden had at first one (2010-2016) and then 2 (2017-2021) graduate assistants funded by Applegate’s office (EVP for University Academic Affairs).

 In early 2009 NSSE initiated plans to update the survey and to explore the psychometric properties of the benchmarks of educational effectiveness. NSSE staff implemented a multi-faceted development plan, exploring new content, testing items and recruiting a diverse set of pilot institutions and involving expert advisors and reviewers to consult on content and measures, and a comprehensive communication plan to ensure institutions had sufficient notice and guidance on the update. The first pilot was undertaken in 2011, a second in 2012, with full 2.0 implementation in 2013. Many new staff are hired to test, pilot, launch new surveys and to redesign and execute reports and new resources to support the user experience.  New competition for NSSE in the 2012, the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) supplanting NSSE among AAU members.

Considerable effort is made to promote the new survey, communicate about new Engagement Indicators, scoring and tracking changed and new items see “Introducing NSSE 2013”. NSSE creates multiple, optional modules, called Topical Modules, with the roll-out of NSSE 2.0 in 2013. These short surveys offer an important opportunity to help institutions study current topics in higher education. Institutional users seem to value the opportunity to drill down into areas of special interest, and the popularity of modules offers an interesting insight into the topics of special interest and concern to colleges and universities

2013-14, NSSE partners with the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) on a grant from the Kresge Foundation and the Greater Texas Foundation for collaborative work with selected colleges and universities in strengthening the engagement, transfer, and college completion of their Latino students. By 2014, NSSE distributed over a million copies of the English language version of the pocket guide – a resource to focus high school students on asking the right questions for a college visit.

NSSE conducts its 5th and largest “NSSE user workshop” at Bucknell University in 2015.

The issuing of the 4th volume of “Lessons from the Field”, NSSE’s repository of institutions actions on NSSE results, in 2017 added 23 more case examples to demonstrate the project’s catalyzing influence in improvement of undergraduate education.  Additional examples have been documented in “Lessons from the Field Dispatches” – shorter briefs of 4-6 institutional examples of data use, with approximately 500 searchable examples demonstrating action on student engagement data.

In 2015 and in 2023, CPR conducted its first two formal Annual Review as required by all Centers at Indiana University, which included a self-study report, a visit and report by external reviewers, and action items. Around the same time, the Strada Foundation invested in the creation of Career & Workforce Preparation Module and research on career education. Additionally, between 2018-2021, Lumina invests 200K into a study, “Assessing Quality and Equity in High-Impact Practices”.

In 2020, NSSE entered its third decade accessing the quality of undergraduate learning and success. Most institutions now value a culture of evidence, promoting deep approaches to learning, developing high-impact practices, and tracking engagement indicators. Next NSSE leadership transition, Alex McCormick NSSE’s second Director retires in 2022, Kinzie and Dr. Cindy Ann Kilgo appointed interim co-directors, and Dr. Leonard Taylor appointed third Director in 2023, now developing NSSE 3.0.

Conclusion

From its early origins the Center on Postsecondary Research evolved into a significant research center that fulfilled its original aspiration to become a major higher education research center. Also, as hoped, it helped to stimulate and support the securing of funding projects for faculty and students in the HESA programs. Equally important, the Center became an invaluable training ground for HESA doctoral students with a strong research orientation who aspired to careers as faculty members and institutional researchers. For example, the HESA students who worked on NSC signature reports learned how to write short, policy relevant reports and developed skills in manipulating very large complex databases. While the analyses were descriptive, managing the database and writing code to use the data are very challenging, experiences very few doctoral students can get anywhere. Similarly, students and staff working on the various engagement surveys have made dozens of presentations and contributed to many publications.

References

  • Borden, V. M. H. (October 2014). Enhancing the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to better reflect 21st century U.S. higher education. Four-year grant awarded by the Lumina Foundation $500,000.
  • Borden, V. M. H. (October 2014). Maintaining and enhancing the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Five-year grant awarded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. $90,000.
  • Borden, V. M. H. (August 2012). Breakthrough learning models in postsecondary education. Subcontract with the City University of New York Research Foundation. August 15, 2012 – July 31, 2014; $169,533
  • Borden, V. M. H. (June 2012). Non-financial indicators – additional analyses. Contract for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association for Colleges and Schools. June 4 – August 10, 2012; $15,000.
  • Borden, V. M. H. (January 2012). Supervision of the dual credit information project. Contract for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association for Colleges and Schools. January 1 – May 31, 2012; $5,500.
  • Borden, V. M. H. (January 2011). Alternative methods for calculating a student-to-faculty ratio and graduate full-time equivalent enrollment. Coffey Consulting, contractor with the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics. January 2011 – September 2011; $30,000
  • Borden, V. M. H. (August 2010).  Non-financial indicators of higher education institution viability. Contract for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association for Colleges and Schools. August 23 – October 22, 2010; $15,000.
  • Bridges, B. K., Cambridge, B., Kuh, G. D., & Leegwater, L. H. (2005). Student engagement at minority serving institutions: Emerging lessons from the BEAMS project. In G. H. Gaither (Ed.), What works: Achieving success in minority retention. New Directions for Institutional Research, 2003(125), 25–43.
  • Gonyea, R, & Kuh, G. (2009). (Eds), Using student engagement data in institutional research, New Directions for Institutional Research, 141. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Hossler, D., Kuh, G. D., & Olsen, D. (2001a). Finding fruit on the vines: Using higher education research and institutional research to guide institutional policies and strategies (Part I). Research in Higher Education, 42(2), 211–221.
  • Hossler, D., Kuh, G. D., & Olsen, D. (2001b). Finding (more) fruit on the vines: Using higher education research and institutional research to guide institutional policies and strategies (Part II). Research in Higher Education, 42(2), 223–235.
  • Hossler, D. & Price, D. (2014, March/April). Tuition discounting in an era of accountability and scarcity. Association of Governing Boards Reports, 2(22), 35-39.
  • Hossler, D., Shapiro, D., & Dundar, A. (2012, September). National Student Clearinghouse Snapshot Report on Degree Attainment by Age. Herndon, VA: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. http://www.studentclearinghouse.info/snapshot/docs/SnapshotReport7-DegreeGrowthbyAge2Yr.pdf
  • Hossler, D., Shapiro, D., Dundar, A., Chen, J., Zerquera, D., Ziskin, M., & Torres, V. (2012 Winter). Reverse transfers: A national view of student mobility from four- to two-year institutions. (Signature Report Number 3). Herndon, VA: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (http://www.studentclearinghouse.info/signature/3/about-the-authors.php)
  • Hossler, D., Ziskin, M., Gross, J. P. K., Kim, S., & Cekic, O. (2009). Student aid and its role in encouraging persistence. In J. C. Smart (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (Vol. XXIV, pp. 389-426). New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  • Hossler, D., Ziskin, M., Lucido, J., Schulz, S., Dadashova, A., & Zerquera, D. (2011, March). How four-year colleges and universities organize themselves to promote student persistence: The emerging national picture. New York, NY: College Board.
  • Hu, S., Kuh, G.D., & Li, S. (2008). The effects of engagement in inquiry-oriented activities on student learning and personal development. Innovative Higher Education, 33, 71-81.
  • Kuh, G.D. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
  • Kuh, G. D. (2009, spring). The National Survey of Student Engagement: Conceptual and empirical foundations. In R. M. Gonyea & G. D. Kuh (Eds.), Using NSSE in institutional research. New Directions for Institutional Research, 2009(141), 5–20.
  • Kuh, G.D. (2013). You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. In M. Paulsen (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research, 28, 1-45.
  • Kuh, G. D., Cruce, T. M., Shoup, R., Kinzie, J., & Gonyea, R. M. (2008). Unmasking the effects of student engagement on college grades and persistence. The Journal of Higher Education, 79, 540–563.
  • Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J., Buckley, J. A., Bridges, B. K., & Hayek, J. C. (2007). Piecing together the student success puzzle: Research, propositions, and recommendations (ASHE Higher Education Report, Vol. 31, No. 3). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
  • Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J., Schuh, J. H., Whitt, E. J., & Associates (2005). Student success in college: Creating conditions that matter. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
  • Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J., Schuh, J. H., Whitt, E. J., & Associates (2010). Student success in college: Creating conditions that matter (new preface and epilogue). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
  • Kuh, G.D. & O’Day, P.T. (2020). Whence did thee come, LSSSE? Journal of Legal Education, 69(2), 402-411.
  • Kuh, G.D., & Pascarella, E.T. (2004). What does institutional selectivity tell us about educational quality? Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 36(5), 52-58. [Reprinted in CURRENT, December 2004, (468), 11-14.]
  • Kuh, G. D., Schuh, J. H., Whitt, E. J., & Associates (1991). Involving colleges: Successful approaches to fostering student learning and personal development outside the classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
  • National Survey of Student Engagement. (n.d). Archive of annual results (2000 to present). Annual Results. https://nsse.indiana.edu/research/annual-results/past-annual-results/index.html
  • National Survey of Student Engagement. (n.d). Building engagement and attainment for minority students (BEAMS). Special Projects.https://nsse.indiana.edu/support-resources/partnerships/special-projects/beams/index.html
  • National Survey of Student Engagement. (n.d). NSSE advisors. About NSSE.  https://nsse.indiana.edu/nsse/about-nsse/advisors/index.html.
  • National Survey of Student Engagement. (n.d). Project Deep: Documenting effective educational practice. Special Projects.https://nsse.indiana.edu/support-resources/partnerships/special-projects/project-deep/index.html.
  • National Survey of Student Engagement. (n.d). Special research projects – Current and past. Special Projects.https://nsse.indiana.edu/support-resources/partnerships/special-projects/index.html.
  • Pike, G.R., & Kuh, G.D. (2005). A typology of student engagement for American colleges and universities. Research in Higher Education, 46, 185-209.

*People who are deceased.

Appendix A

CPR Directors

  • George Kuh
  • Don Hossler
  • Vasti Torres
  • Tom Nelson Laird
  • Lucy LePeau