Colleges share institutional information

Brian Farkas News Editor

In a continuing effort to mitigate the influence of college rankings, many colleges and universities are establishing alternative ways for prospective students to compare institutions.

Data collected from some 257 colleges and universities by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) was published in USA Today on Monday, Nov. 5. NSSE claims to measure the experience of intellectual and student life based on the reports of randomly selected freshmen and seniors at participating colleges.

Questions address such issues as academic challenge, interaction between students and faculty, and the amount of collaborative learning on campus.

Although Vassar participated in the NSSE survey its sixth survey this year, it declined to allow these results to be published in USA Today.

Director of Institutional Research David Davis-Van Atta, who began work at Vassar on Oct. 1, claimed that the NSSE had not explained how they would use this information. “Since the NSSE began [in 1999], many colleges, particularly small private colleges, have been suspicious of exactly how their data is being used,” he said. “It was not clear exactly what information they were going to publish, and they did not tell us how data would be presented.”

While many of the 257 schools were large public university, others were small private colleges, including Harvey Mudd College and Middlebury College. “In general, highly-selective private institutions have been fairly NSSE-averse,” Davis-Van Atta said. “NSSE has been fairly unclear about who owns the data that they collect.”

Initiatives such as the NSSE are responding in part to demands for increased accountability in higher education. In September, The Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education chaired by United States Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, reported that many schools have risen in cost with no proof of results.

“Because of this Commission’s report, and for other reasons, there has been a great deal of mistrust of higher education lately,” said Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill. “And of course, whenever a school elects not to participate in a survey, such as the rankings conducted each year by U.S. News and World Report, the public might interpret that the institution has something to hide.”

Though Vassar did not permit its NSSE results to be published, it recently joined a online database that publicizes similar information. The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities launched the University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN) this October. This Web site includes hundreds of institutional profiles with statistics on admissions, enrollment, demographics, graduation rates, common fields of study, accreditation, class size and tuition. According to Davis-Van Atta, much of the information tracked by U-CAN is “quantitative input measure,” rather than the more qualitative survey questions of the NSSE.

U-CAN is only one way Vassar intends to increase institutional transparency. Davis-Van Atta holds the College’s first institutional research position. “[President Hill] felt that it was important for there to be an office that studies the workings of the College in detail,” he said. “Vassar has never had that.”

Davis-Van Atta plans to introduce a redesigned Institutional Research homepage, which will offer a variety of both quantitative and qualitative information. “A lot of this information will be public, but some of it will be limited to members of the Vassar community,” he said. “The reason for this is the constant trade-off between the candor of responses and the publicity of responses—if we want faculty, students, or whoever to give us honest answers, we often need to promise some of privacy with sensitive information.”

Some colleges hope that making more information available will reassure prospective students and those critical of a high level of student achievement, and increase public trust. Such was the case in the recent College Sustainability Report Card released by the Sustainable Endowments Institute to meassure commitment to sustainability. This study gave Vassar a D for endowment transparency saying, “Vassar does not typically release investment holdings.”

According to Hill, transparency of the endowment can be tricky. “We use larger firms who invest a lot of our money for us,” she explained. “Those firms might be buying or selling on our behalf, even if we’re not aware of every transaction. We should teach about conservation, but I’m not sure that potentially compromising our endowment income is the best way of doing that,” said Hill, noting that revenue from Vassar’s endowment makes up about one-third of the College’s annual operating budget.

The amount and variety of information that should be made public about colleges and universities is still a matter of vigorous debate. But as critics demand more transparency, colleges are trying to meet the public demand for information.