When looking at prospective universities, students should not solely rely on rankings and scores to determine the quality of education and instead look at individual experiences within that university, according to a new survey released Monday.
The National Survey of Student Engagement conducted a study involving approximately 380,000 freshmen and seniors from 722 four-year colleges and universities, including the University of Wisconsin.
The study, which has been conducted for 10 years, shows the quality of undergraduate education differs more within colleges and universities rather than between them.
“We might make a comparison and say that one school is better than the other, when in actuality the average student experience is just that: average,” said Jillian Kinzie, a spokesperson for the National Survey of Student Engagement. “We have to look at the range of students’ involvement.”
UW has participated in the survey in 2004, 2006 and 2008 and the results have been “amazingly consistent,” according to Kinzie.
“Whether institutions use this information alone, that’s up to them,” Kinzie said. “They might see if it matches other concerns and help them make a change.”
Clifton Conrad, UW professor of higher education and educational leadership, said although prospective students may want to use the survey results alone to obtain quick indicators about an institution, it is important to take into account the difficulty of comparing such schools.
“To make an overgeneralization on the basis of a few indicators of student engagement can provide another lens in the quality of learning, but we need to be very, very careful about celebrating them,” Conrad said. “Institutions tend to reify them if they do well on them.”
Dean of the College of Letters and Science Gary Sandefur said he “wouldn’t use it to make any judgments or decisions, but it is certainly useful information.”
Sandefur added there is a lot of different information available worth looking at, but students and universities should not focus solely on one piece.
“Not every student has the same educational experience. Some people get a lot out of it, but some don’t,” Kinzie said. “There is a wide range of student involvement at most institutions in terms of quality of experience.”
Student responses to the survey indicated that more than 90 percent of the variation of undergraduate education quality was within an institution, and rankings of a specific institution may not truly represent all of the experiences of individual students.
The survey results show that students would greatly benefit if these institutions examine who is performing at the top of the spectrum versus who is near the bottom, and then determine the reasons why there is a gap in quality of experience, Kinzie said.
“I would approach these results with a full measure of skepticism and use them at most as opportunities to reflect on what we are doing to engage students in their learning on the assumption that there may be some connections between engagement and genuine and deep learning,” Conrad said.
