A private, comprehensive liberal arts institution located in Salt Lake City, Utah, Westminster College enrolls approximately 2,000 undergraduates. The college has administered NSSE 7 times, FSSE 4 times, and BCSSE once since 2001, and utilizes combined survey results to better understand student engagement on campus and to effectively plan for the future. Paul Presson, Associate Provost for Institutional Research and Assessment, finds that comparisons and analyses using what he terms the “linked” data from all three surveys to analyze engagement trends over time is essential to its Westminster’s long term planning. He explains, “We take it seriously. We started a new process of what we call ‘effectiveness retreats’ where we bring in senior staff, deans, board members and we spend half a day looking at NSSE, BCSSE, and FSSE and the senior surveys, alumni surveys, career center surveys—I spend basically the whole fall semester looking at those findings.”
FSSE results have provided a point of reference to understand students’ engagement at Westminster. Most NSSE and FSSE comparison results have been consistent. However, in some cases NSSE and FSSE results identified mismatches between student and faculty responses. To provide an example of how Westminster has integrated its survey data, NSSE results indicated that students felt satisfied with their level of contact with faculty for academic advising but did not feel they were getting enough career advising and general emotional support. The college looked at FSSE results to verify that faculty perceived that students felt these types of interactions were important, then implemented a new career advising program and created a learning community requirement for first-year students. Westminster will use BCSSE results to further refine and monitor its understanding of student needs for institutional support.
