Student affairs assessment

It is not research, and it is not a satisfaction survey

Assessment and research are often conflated because they use overlapping methods. The difference is purpose. Research aims to produce generalisable knowledge and is judged on whether it would hold elsewhere. Assessment aims to inform a decision at one institution and is judged on whether it was good enough to act on. Assessment can be locally valid and unpublishable, and that is not a defect.

The more expensive confusion is with satisfaction. Attendance counts, event feedback and headcount growth measure whether people came and enjoyed it. They are worth knowing, and they describe your reach and your marketing rather than your impact. A division that reports only those is reporting activity.

Choose measures tied to numbers someone else already reports

The practical constraint on this work is not methodological sophistication, it is survival across budget cycles. Pick three or four measures and connect each to a figure the institution already reports to a board, an accreditor or the federal government:

• Persistence to the next term: the measure most directly connected to what a division can influence.
• Credit accumulation: the check on whether continued enrollment is continued progress.
• Placement or continuing education: the outcome families and boards ask about.
• Sense of belonging: if you already run an instrument that asks about it, rather than commissioning a new one.

Anything unconnected to a number someone else already cares about will lose its funding the first time budgets tighten, however elegant the design.

The self-selection problem, stated plainly

Almost all co-curricular programming is opt-in, which makes participants a self-selected group. Comparing participants to non-participants overstates the effect, and a competent provost will say so before you finish the slide. Say it first: name the limitation, then say what the finding still supports.

Where no matched comparison exists, three honest claim types remain, and all three are fundable:

• Reach: how many students from a named population the program engaged, and how many had no prior involvement.
• Change within participants: pre-to-post movement on a defined measure, described as movement among participants and nothing more.
• Implementation: the program ran as designed, at the intended scale, with these response rates.

None requires a causal claim, and a specific reach number typically moves a budget conversation further than a contested effect size.

The two irrecoverable mistakes

Not collecting a baseline. A pre-measure costs almost nothing at orientation and is impossible to reconstruct in year two. This is the most common unrecoverable error in co-curricular assessment, and it usually surfaces the moment the program succeeds and someone asks for evidence.

Not defining participation before the term begins. Deciding afterward what counted invites the accusation that the definition was fitted to the result.

Benchmark against your sector, not the national average

Median full-time retention across US degree-granting institutions is 71%, against 77% at private nonprofit four-year institutions and 63% at public two-year institutions (IPEDS, Fall 2023). A 68% rate is a serious problem at one and an achievement at the other. Comparing to a national average rather than a sector median is the most common error in this kind of reporting.

See also co-curricular record, high-impact practices, and our guide to measuring student outcomes.