The Seattle PI drew attention to two major UW Initiatives that were recently highlighted in a message from Provost Mary Lidstrom. Be sure to check out the new websites detailing both of these new efforts:
Category: Institutional Research
Latest NCES Report Provides Data on Higher Ed Employees
The National Center For Education Statistics (NCES) is a part of the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Every US University governed by Title IV of the Higher Education Act (federal student aid programs) is required to submit annual data to NCES via nine surveys that cover topics such as pricing, admissions, enrollment, employment, financial aid, graduation/completion, institutional finance and more.
NCES releases regular reports synthesizing the massive amount of data that institutions submit. The latest, Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2009, and Salaries of Full-Time Instructional Staff, 2009-10, summarizes national trends in higher education employment. Some of the findings include:
- Institutions reported employing (not including medical schools or hospitals) 3.8 million employees– 2.4 million full-time and 1.4 million part-time.
- Of the 2.4 million full-time employees, 1.4 million were classified as professional (see report for definition), 46% of whom had faculty status: 21% with tenure, 9% on the tenure-track, and 17% not on the tenure-track or at an institution without tenure.
- Of full-time faculty with tenure, 65% were men while 35% were women.
- Of full-time faculty with tenure, 81% were White, 8% were Asian, 5% were African American, and 4% were Hispanic.
You can explore more NCES reports, facts, and figures online. Additionally, you can build your own queries and pull up institutional data based on any set of universities you identify.
UW Enrollment at All-Time High
At this month’s meeting, the Board of Regents was given a presentation detailing student enrollment to provide a sense of the size and scope of the UW’s instructional enterprise. Highlights from this presentation are below.
All enrollments
- In Fall 2010, 49,940 students were enrolled; this represents a 21 percent increase over the Fall 2000 enrollment of 41,200.
- Of the 49,940 students, 42,935 (86%) are considered “state-reported students.”
- Of the 7,005 non-state-reported enrollments, 1,020 represent students allowed to take up to six credits on a space available basis (senior citizens and state and university employees). Those remaining are students in fee-based programs.
State-reported undergraduate enrollments
- In Fall 2010, 32,500 state-reported undergraduates are enrolled, up 16 percent from the Fall 2000 level of 28,000.
- Of these 32,500 undergraduates, 16 percent are nonresidents.
Looking forward, a new report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, 2010: State of College Admission, puts college enrollment figures in a national context by discussing trends in the college-age population and projections for post-secondary participation in the coming years. They find that while the number of high school graduates has peaked after a decade of growth (expected to rebound by 2018-19), college enrollment continues at an all-time high even though minorities and low-income students remain underrepresented.
NGA’s Complete to Compete Initiative Gains Traction
The recently announced National Governor’s Association initiative ‘Complete to Compete’ outlines a promising plan to create a national set of performance metrics to enhance accountability and shape funding strategies. The NGA, under the leadership of incoming Chair West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin III, convened a Work Group on Common College Completion Metrics to make recommendations on the common higher education measures that states should collect and report publicly. The goal is to improve college completion rates and overall productivity in a new era of fiscal constraints coupled with unprecedented demand for higher education. Reliable, comparable data within the sector will be key to achieving these goals as NGA and others attempt to identify which policies and practices are tied to successful outcomes.
The initiative has gained supporters across the country, including among the Higher Education Funding Task Force created by Governor Gregoire in Washington this past summer. Below is a summary of the proposed Complete to Compete metrics.
They use the following definitions:
Completion rate: The percentage of individuals who complete a certificate or degree (e.g., associate and bachelor’s).
Attainment rate: The percentage of a population that has obtained a certificate or degree.
Productivity: Awarding more higher education certificates and degrees within the same resources, while maintaining quality.
They recommend the following metrics:
OUTCOME METRICS:
- Degrees awarded: annual number and percentage of certificates, associate degrees, and bachelor’s degrees awarded;
- Graduation rates: number and percentage of certificate- or degree-seeking students who graduate within normal program time (two years for associate’s degrees; four years for bachelor’s degrees) or extended time (three years for associate’s degrees; six years for bachelor’s degrees);
- Transfer rates: annual number and percentage of students who transfer from a two-year to four-year institution; and
- Time and credits to degree: average length of time in years and average number of credits that graduating students took to earn a certificate, an associate degree, or a bachelor’s degree.
PROGRESS METRICS:
- Enrollment in remedial education: number and percentage of entering first-time undergraduate students who place into and enroll in remedial math, English, or both;
- Success beyond remedial education: number and percentage of first-time undergraduate students who complete a remedial education course in math, English or both and complete a college-level course in the same subject;
- Success in first-year college courses: annual number and percentage of entering first-time undergraduate students who complete entry college-level math and English courses within the first two consecutive academic years; and
- Credit accumulation: number and percentage of first-time undergraduate students completing 24 credit hours (for full-time students) or 12 credit hours (for part-time students) within their first academic year;
- Retention rates: number and percentage of entering undergraduate students who enroll consecutively from fall-to-spring and fall-to-fall at an institution of higher education;
- Course completion: percentage of credit hours completed out of those attempted during an academic year.
In order to track whether access to higher education is sacrificed in the name of completion, NGA also recommends the following ‘context’ metrics:
CONTEXT METRICS:
- Enrollment: total first-time undergraduate students enrolled in an institution of higher education;
- Completion ratio: annual ratio of certificates and degrees awarded per 100 full-time equivalent (FTE) undergraduate students; and
- Market penetration: annual ratio of certificates and degrees awarded relative to the state’s population with a high school diploma.
The UW has worked with the State for years in efforts to create a robust performance agreement. As those efforts continue, the influence of a national initiative such as Complete to Compete will be interesting to note.
NRC Releases Long Awaited Doctoral Program Rankings
After five years, $4 million and a lot of effort across many institutions, the National Research Council has released an update to their 1995 assessment of doctoral programs. A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Program in the United States analyzes 2005-06 academic year data collected from over 5,000 doctoral programs at over 200 universities. The NRC collected data directly from faculty, students, graduate programs, and institutions. The Graduate School coordinated UW participation in the assessment, which you can learn more about on their website.
Programs are ranked on the same 21 key variables by two different methodologies, the results of which are reported separately. These methodologies were very complex, but, essentially, the “S” (Survey-Based) rankings weight the relative value of the 21 key variables by program, based on faculty ratings of the relative value of each variables in a given discipline. For example, in the physical sciences, the number of external grants won is weighted more heavily than it would be for an English program. Alternatively, the “R” (Regression-Based) ratings are more similar to the traditional ‘reputation ranking’ where faculty were asked to rank a set of random programs, and then the key variables most associated with the highest ranked programs were assigned the most weight in the overall analysis of programs. Both sets of rankings are reported as ranges (e.g. a program might be ranked as somewhere between 3rd and 11th, at a 90% level of confidence).
While many UW programs do well in these rankings, criticisms of both the data and methodology are important to consider. Inside Higher Ed weighs in with an assessment of the ambivalence surrounding the veracity of the rankings, and the UW’s own Dean of Engineering, Matt O’Donnell, released a statement about possible shortcomings. UW Computer Science & Engineering also issued a strong critique, on which the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The Chronicle also compiled these data in an easy to use format and offered its own analysis of the report’s delay and overall worth.
How meaningful these rankings are will be debated in the days ahead, but there is at least one important and indisputable conclusion included in the report, which is that public universities play an outsized role in educating our nation’s graduate students:
“Seventy-one percent of the programs ranked in the NRC study are in public universities. The proportion of programs in the universities with the largest programs is similar (70 percent). Among the 37 universities that produced 50 percent of Ph.D.’s from 2002 to 2006, 70 percent were public. Although public universities rely increasingly on nonpublic sources of funding, cutbacks in public funding for universities has a powerful effect on doctoral education simply because of how many large Ph.D. programs exist in public universities.”