February 17
Student engagement surveys challenge rankings
Often, international students become fixated on the rankings of universities provided by organizations like U.S. News and World Report.
In the Washington Post there’s a great article about a new way to measure university quality, called the student engagement survey.
Introduced 10 years ago by Indiana University researchers as an antidote to U.S. News, the survey has won buy-in from 1,400 colleges, with about half that number participating each year. Rather than rank colleges on overall quality, it attempts to quantify whether students at a particular school are learning, through a battery of questions: How often do you raise your hand in class? How many 20-page papers have you written? How often do you e-mail a professor? Each college is measured against similar institutions, and over time. But there is no overall ranking.
When you look at a university’s ranking, it’s also a good idea to look at data like that provided by such surveys, to get a fuller picture of the reality behind the ranking.
