Dr. Caroline Whitson, president of Columbia College, has announced that the College’s recently released scores on the 2007 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) exceed the averages of all participating four-year colleges and universities across the country in all five categories. More than 1,458,000 students at nearly 1,200 different four-year colleges and universities participated in the 2007 study.

The NSSE questions both first-year students and seniors at participating institutions about the quality of their college experience in five areas:

• Level of Academic Challenge
• Active and Collaborative Learning
• Student-Faculty interaction
• Enriching Educational Experiences
• Supportive Campus Environment

The purpose of the national survey is to provide higher education administrators and faculty with substantive, qualitative information on how well students are learning and what they put into, and get out of, their undergraduate experience.

“The NSSE Institute conducts the kind of in-depth inquiries required to understand the all-important qualitative and cultural dimensions of fostering student success. Understanding and investigating variances [in benchmark scores] may also help identify truly high-performing institutions---those that score well on a given item or benchmark but can also exhibit a tight enough distribution of scores that we can be sure that most students are affected,” says Peter T. Ewell, vice president, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS).

“We believe that this year’s NSSE results continue to confirm what we know about the strengths of Columbia College,” says Whitson. “one of the primary reasons for our success is the engagement of our students in the learning process, both in and out of the classroom.”

Specifically, students are asked a series of questions such as, “How often have you contributed to class discussions?; “How often have you included diverse perspectives in writing assignments?”; “How much has your coursework emphasized analyzing basic elements of an idea, experience or theory?”; and “What is the quality of your relationships with other students, faculty members, and administrative personnel at your institution?”

The survey was established in 2000 with a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts and receives support from Lumina Foundation for Education, the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Teagle Foundation, and the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative.