Identifying Comparison Institutions

Higher education institutions are often concerned with how they compare to other higher education institutions. In the case of my institution, we have often compared ourselves to other Catholic institutions. The last comparison group was developed nearly ten years ago. Senior leadership has begun the discussion as to whether this is still the appropriate comparison group. In order to assist in this discussion, my office attempted to use an empirical method to determine a comparison group based on quantitative similarities.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) collects information on an annual basis from all Title IV higher education institutions. The collection effort is implemented during the academic year with the inclusion of information pertaining to enrollment, financial aid, finance, graduation, and human resources. Subsequently, the institutional identifiable data....

Quality Point Status

Accountability is a major concern for higher education officials in the US and beyond. There is increased pressure to retain and graduate students in order to satisfy key stakeholders such as board members and taxpayers. Students who fail academically comprise one population we can look to for improvement. This post will focus on a seldom-used measure to determine the status of undergraduate students who are in academic distress. The name of the measure is "quality point status." This measure is cited several times in higher eductaion literature as honor point deficiency (Schuster, 1971; Russell, 1982; Kinloch, Frost, & MacKay, 1993). For the purpose of this post, the measure has been renamed to reflect a negative, neutral, and positive nature. Negative quality point status reflects the number of quality points needed to restore the student’s grade point average to a 2.00. Prior to understanding quality point status, a brief description of the method for determining grade point average (GPA) is in order. A students GPA is determined by assigning a value to the letter grade earned in a course (e.g., A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, and F=0) and multiplying this value by the number of credits assigned to the course. This calculation determines the number of quality points awarded per course. Subsequently, the sum of the quality points....

Faculty Time Commitments

On occasion, I am asked to describe the typical faculty member’s workload at my institution. Although this may seem like a simple request, I know of very few academic units that track such a measure. I have always tried to explain the process by referring to the traditional view of scholarship which includes activities related to teaching, research, and service. Of course, one would expect much variability when comparing the amount of time an individual faculty member would spend on these three activities. Still, an IR professional may want to approximate this number for a variety of reasons to include collective bargaining, resource allocation, or course release policy development.

In my case, I took advantage of the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE) to approximate these time commitments at the institutional level. At our institution, approximately 400 full time faculty members were asked to complete the survey. Overall, 183 (47%) individuals responded to the survey. The area of the FSSE....