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Although acknowledged that academic advising helps students adjust to and deal with the challenges of college, little is known about students' frequency of interactions with advisors. Using data from 52,546 full-time, first-year students at 209 diverse institutions, we examined the frequency with which students met with academic advisors and the way these interactions vary by student and institutional characteristics. We found that the typical first-year student met with an advisor 1 to 3 times during his or her first college year; however, the number of meetings varied across student subpopulations and institutional types. [This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, Chicago, IL, April 2015.]

High-impact practices (HIPs), such as learning communities, undergraduate research, internships, study abroad, and culminating experiences, are lauded as transformative and particularly beneficial for historically underrepresented students. This article responds to the call to focus on racially minoritized student experiences in HIPs. The authors spotlight the experience of racially minoritized students to inform the advancement of the HIP movement by analyzing student comments about HIPs and what they illustrate about quality and equity, and how this can inform the design of less biased, culturally relevant, high-quality HIPs. A deeper exploration ensures that the HIP movement proceeds with attention to quality, rectifies educational inequalities, and affords racially minoritized students high-quality, enriching experiential education.

Although they have been developed for a variety of purposes, classification systems for tertiary or postsecondary education institutions offer a foundation for recognizing diverse institutional missions in policy, research, and practice. Diverse missions, in turn, are important to achieving broad societal goals of educating an increasingly diverse array of learners, contributing to scientific, technological and professional development, and addressing increasingly complex social issues in an increasingly interconnected global community. After reviewing the purposes and consequences, intended and unintended, of several popular classifications, this article addresses the potential for current or future classification systems to promote and support institutional differentiation. Specifically, we consider how appropriately designed classifications can properly recognize mission differentiation and assess the future prospects for contextualizing performance and accountability assessments through the lens of classification.

Online learning is the fastest growing segment in U.S. higher education and is increasingly adopted in public and private not-for-profit institutions. While the impact of online learning on educational outcomes is becoming more clear, the literature on its connection with student engagement is sparse. Student engagement measures identify key aspects of the learning process that can improve learning and outcomes like retention and achievement. The few studies investigating the link between online learning and student engagement found positive benefits for online learners compared to face-to-face learners in terms of perceived academic challenge, learning gains, satisfaction, and better study habits. On the other hand, face-to-face learners reported higher levels of environment support, collaborative learning, and faculty interaction. However, these studies did not effectively account for the differences in background characteristics like age, time spent working or caring for dependents, and enrollment status. Further, they did not consider the increasingly large population of students who enroll in both online and face-to-face courses. In our study, we used propensity score matching on the 2015 National Survey of Student Engagement data to account for the disparities in these groups' demographics variables. After matching, we found that some of the previous literature's differences diminish or disappear entirely. This suggests differences in supportive environments and learning strategies have more to do with online student characteristics than learning mode. However, online learning still falls well below other modes in terms of collaborative learning and interaction with faculty.

Students' time expenditures influence their learning and development. This study used latent profile analysis to identify a taxonomy of how first-year students spend their time using a large multi-institution sample. We identified four time usage patterns by first-year students titled Balanced, Involved, Partiers, and Parents. Sex, expected major field, on-campus residency, age, Greek-life membership, and standardized test scores were predictive of students' time use patterns. Holding a range of student and institutional factors constant, members of the involved group, on average, reported higher levels of engagement than the Balanced group, while Partiers reported lower levels of engagement. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

This chapter examines the differences between institutions with high and low levels of involvement in service learning as well as the differences between students with high and low levels of involvement. The study shows a correlation between institutional organization and service-learning emphasis and describes, at the student level, correlations between service-learning involvement and both deep approaches to learning and self-reported gains.

Using data from the 2006 cohort of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, we developed a student typology based on student responses to survey items on the National Survey of Student Engagement. We then examined the utility of this typology in understanding direct-assessment learning outcomes, self-reported gains, grade-point average, and persistence from the first to second year of college. Results from linear and logistic regression models indicated there were relationships between student types and the various outcomes, and that an engagement-based student typology could help deepen our understanding of the college student experience and college outcomes.

Using data from the 2006 cohort of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, we examined the relationships between three approaches to measuring student learning outcomes (direct-assessment learning gains, self-reported gains, and college grades) and student persistence from the first to second year. Results from a series of logistic regressions indicated that students' grade-point averages had the largest explanatory power in student persistence, followed by self-reported gains. Direct-assessment learning gains had the least power in explaining persistence. The findings have implications for the national conversation on student success in college.

The authors articulate objections to the organization of the recent special issue on student engagement and respond in detail to three criticisms leveled in that issue. Situating their response relative to longstanding calls to make research more relevant to practice, they argue that the validity critique inappropriately focuses on criterion validity and rests on unwarranted generalizations and conjecture. The critique regarding the omission of intercultural effort rests upon misapprehensions of both the concept of student engagement and the actual content of the targeted surveys. And single-institution tests of benchmarks of effective educational practice improperly assume that the benchmarks represent latent constructs. (Contains 5 footnotes.)

This study examined the contingent relationships between learning community participation and student engagement in educational activities inside and outside the classroom using data from the 2004 administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Results indicated that learning community participation was positively and significantly related to student engagement, both for first-year students and seniors. For some types of engagement, relationships were significantly stronger for seniors than for first-year students. Analyses also revealed there was substantial variability across institutions in the magnitude of the relationships between learning community participation and first-year students' levels of engagement. Although institutional characteristics accounted for some of the variability across institutions, a substantial amount of the variability in engagement-learning community relationships remained unexplained.

Calls for accountability in higher education are prompted in part by questions concerning whether colleges and universities use their resources effectively to promote student learning. Unfortunately, too little is known about whether money matters to desired outcomes of college. Using students' responses to the 2004 administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) in concert with institutional data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the College Board, this study examined the relationships between educational expenditures, student engagement and selected student self-reported learning outcomes, controlling for student and institutional characteristics. Results indicated that expenditures were modestly related to student engagement and learning outcomes. However, the nature of these relationships differed, depending on the engagement/outcome measure and student year in school.

Economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks recently assembled time-series survey data on college student time use from a number of sources spanning four decades. Their study, titled "The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence from a Half Century of Time Use Data," will appear in a forthcoming issue of the "Review of Economics and Statistics." While the journal article discusses the implications of diminished study time for understanding trends in the economic return to baccalaureate education and in human capital investment, the authors summarized their findings in the more sensationally titled "Leisure College, USA: The Decline in Student Study Time" published by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (Babcock and Marks 2010). As both titles indicate, they found evidence of a pronounced decline in the number of hours that full-time college students say they study, from about twenty-four hours per week in 1961 to fourteen hours per week in 2003. Although Babcock and Marks examined change in study time over three time periods (1961 to 1981; 1987, 1988, and 1989 to 2003, 2004, and 2005; and 1961 to 2003), the author focuses attention in this article on the long-term change from 1961 to 2003, which is also the focus of the AEI article. Babcock and Marks devote a portion of each article to identifying and addressing factors that might account for the apparent drop in study time. The author briefly summarizes these and the evidence marshaled to dismiss them. Next, he considers some possible explanations for the decline advanced by the researchers, adding some of his own to the list. He concludes with a discussion of what one is to make of these findings. (Contains 3 tables and 2 notes.)

In this article, the author examines various forms of public reporting of student engagement information. Some are controlled by third parties and others by the institutions themselves. He looks at four third-party efforts: (1) the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE); (2) the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA); (3) Transparency by Design (TbD); and (4) the institutionally authorized online publication of results from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) by the daily newspaper "USA TODAY" (USAT). The Center for Community College Student Engagement (which houses CCSSE) recently introduced a new survey focused on the early experience of entering community college students; while this review focuses on CCSSE, it applies equally to the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE), which uses a comparable reporting framework. The four initiatives examined in this article represent a significant advance in the movement for transparency by providing a common framework for the display of comparable information about the student experience for all participating institutions. The institutions involved deserve credit for electing to participate when that decision means ceding control over which institutional results will be displayed and the form that display will take, as well as the danger that the complex information presented will be used by others in simplistic and reductionist rankings enterprises. In the final section, the author advances some propositions regarding the promise, limitations, and potential dangers of transparency. He argues that transparency efforts need to move beyond institution-level summary measures to reveal how the student experience varies within campuses, and also that one needs to move the discussion beyond comparing institutions on the results of a given assessment to what institutions actually do with assessment results--what improvement plans are put in motion and whether they achieve the desired effects. (Contains 1 table and 15 resources.)

This study compares the explanatory power of the 2000 edition of Carnegie Classification, the 2005 revision of the classification, and selected variables underlying Carnegie's expanded 2005 classification system using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement's spring 2004 administration. Results indicate that the 2000 and 2005 classifications generally offer comparable explanatory power for measures of self-reported gains and student engagement, but the new variables from the 2005 system are more strongly related to cognitive outcomes and engagement than were the two categorical groupings. The variables most consistently related to outcomes and engagement are graduate-undergraduate coexistence, residential character of the campus, and arts and sciences share of undergraduate majors. Implications of the findings for research and assessment are discussed.

Accountability pressures in higher education are not new; they are part of an enduring public policy discourse about the costs and benefits, both individual and social, of higher education. What is relatively new, however, is the prominent place that issues of accountability now occupy on the nation's higher education agenda. There is an important difference between the visions of accountability articulated by the accrediting agencies and the Commission on the Future of Higher Education (the so-called Spellings Commission). For the accreditors, educational assessment and improvement is an internal matter organized around candid diagnosis and prescription for improvement, and accountability is accomplished through the approval of accrediting bodies, itself the result of an intensive but largely confidential peer review process. For the Spellings Commission, by contrast, the focus is on public disclosure and transparency in the interest of providing consumer information. In this view, accountability is accomplished by the marketplace--that is, the response of students and their parents--which rewards and punishes institutions based on publicly reported performance information. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) has been embraced by a large number of institutions for both internal diagnosis and public reporting. The author begins with a general discussion of accountability and how assessment tools like NSSE offer several ways that institutions can respond to accountability and transparency demands. Next, he reviews some current examples of the use of NSSE data in accountability and transparency efforts and discusses some important considerations associated with the public reporting of engagement data. The article concludes by looking forward: Where might the movement for greater transparency lead higher education?

"Classification" and "ranking" are tools for comparing colleges and universities, albeit for different purposes. Although "classification" focuses on identifying similarities rather than ordering institutions, it is closely intertwined with "ranking", whether directly through its content, structure, and procedures, or indirectly through the ways it is used and understood by the wider community of users (e.g., researchers, policymakers, institutional leaders, etc.). For this reason, many of the standards, protocols, and best practices established for ranking systems apply as well to the case of classification. This paper examines the interplay between "classification" and "ranking" in some detail, and applies the Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions which were adopted in May 2006 to the case of classification, focusing on the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. (Contains 7 footnotes.)

A satisfactory relationship between doctoral students and their advisors is an essential component of successful doctoral training. Using responses to a national survey of doctoral students in the US from 27 universities and 11 disciplines, this paper explores factors affecting students' satisfaction with the advising relationship. We find that both the criteria used in selecting an advisor and reported advisor behaviours influence satisfaction. Moreover, there are pronounced disciplinary differences in both choice criteria and advisor behaviour, and these are more robust predictors of satisfaction than individual characteristics. A table with descriptive statistics for variables included in the analysis is appended. (Contains 5 tables, 3 figures and 2 notes.)

The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education was established by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1967 to study and make recommendations regarding the major issues facing U.S. higher education. The commission soon confronted a problem: no extant classification system differentiated colleges and universities along the dimensions that were most relevant to its work. So in 1970 the commission developed a new classification scheme to meet its analytic needs. Three years later, it published classification listings of colleges and universities to "be helpful to many individuals and organizations that are engaged in research on higher education." In this article, the authors explore some key issues confronted by the new classification system, assess specific case of classifying colleges and universities, and discuss the classification's future prospects.

Describes the phenomenon of multiple-institution attendance, outlining the primary patterns of student behavior and discussing the implications of these patterns for higher education. Raises the issue of maintaining a proper balance between the integrity and coherence of academic programs and growing demand among consumers and policy makers for easing transfer and other forms of student mobility. (EV)

Illustrates the practical results of the five classification proposals presented in this volume. Each classification model has been applied to a common sample of colleges. Authors review the key implications of this collective exercise. Argues that local constructs demand a more sophisticated database at the national level. (Contains six tables.) (NB)

Traces the history of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and the need to differentiate two-year colleges. Includes brief examination of classification theory and practice, followed by discussion of the particular challenges in classifying two-year colleges. Suggests new systems of classification would bring benefits. (Contains eight references.) (NB)

Describes aspects of bachelor's degree recipients' enrollment and employment experience, including degree expectations, enrollment in advanced degree programs, and occupations and salaries. Discusses how experiences vary with student, enrollment, and job characteristics. (Author/SLD)

A recent paper by one of us (Nelson Laird) and some colleagues brought some sobering news of differences between STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and non-STEM undergraduates with regard [...]