CCSSE / USA TODAY INITIATIVE: INVITATION TO COLLEGE CEOs
Because your institution has participated in the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), I am writing to invite your institution’s involvement in an exciting new partnership between CCSSE and USA TODAY, the top-circulation U.S. daily newspaper with 11 million online readers and 2.3 million print readers. Through this partnership, USA TODAY and CCSSE will work together to communicate the importance of student engagement and illustrate how community and technical colleges are addressing the learning needs of their students. Should you choose to participate, your college will gain a prominent platform by which to communicate your unique strengths to a wide audience of prospective students, parents, educators, and other readers who would like to know more about community colleges and their work to ensure a high level of educational quality for students. This letter provides details of the new project, as well as an attached set of responses to “frequently asked questions.” Using CCSSE’s five benchmarks of effective educational practice (active and collaborative learning, student effort, academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, and support for learners), the project will: Display CCSSE benchmark scores for each participating college, broken out by full- and part-time students, on the USA TODAY web site, along with aggregate comparison scores for the college’s size category (the total benchmark scores for all students at the college will not be displayed) Provide a visually appealing presentation of participating institutions on the USA TODAY web site, with links to information about each college In addition, USA TODAY may provide news coverage, on the web site and/or in its newspaper, describing exemplary educational practices used in community colleges that perform well in various areas of student engagement. This focus on student engagement, scheduled to debut in fall 2008, will accompany a special series of community college stories to be featured in USA TODAY. As you know, participation in CCSSE has always involved an institutional commitment to public reporting of survey results. In fact, CCSSE and its participating colleges often have been favorably cited – in the media, by the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education, and in various other publications – for the forthright commitment to openness, transparency and institutional improvement. To date, though, the survey participation agreement has indicated that public reporting would occur via the CCSSE website, and we have sought college CEO approval for other discussions of college results, even in CCSSE publications. Thus, we come to you now, for your endorsement of your college’s participation in the CCSSE-USA TODAY partnership. We need to hear from you, so please respond by August 8. Across the country, a growing chorus of voices is raising the profile of American community colleges, while also raising questions about quality and accountability – often with the result of comparing community and technical colleges to universities and other institutions with very different missions. This CCSSE-USA TODAY partnership will shine a national spotlight on alternative measures of quality such as CCSSE survey results. In doing so, this project will offer practical help to prospective students, parents and others searching for pertinent information about colleges. The broader and ultimately more significant impact will be to help
the American public to think differently and in more sophisticated ways about how to define and ascertain quality in higher education – particularly in community colleges. High-profile coverage in USA TODAY will spotlight colleges that enroll almost half of U.S. undergraduates, while challenging prevailing conceptions of higher education quality – including the notion that it is even possible to objectively rank "the best colleges." Instead, this initiative aims to promote the concept that quality is not a function of reputation, prestige, and “acceptance ratio,” but rather is determined by the educational experiences that students actually encounter on their college campuses. The initiative further advances the premise that great colleges, where students are highly engaged and can get a high-quality education, abound across the USA, and are within reach academically, geographically and financially. You may be aware that in fall 2007, USA TODAY entered into a similar agreement with NSSE – the National Survey of Student Engagement for four-year colleges and universities. Unlike CCSSE, NSSE has not previously publicly reported survey results. Even so, the response from the four-year sector has been quite positive and is expected to grow substantially in the coming year. USA TODAY’s online treatment of NSSE results and participating institutions can be seen at this link: www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-11-04-nsse-how-to_N.htm Both CCSSE and USA TODAY hope that all of CCSSE's participating colleges will recognize the value of the visibility this partnership offers and will choose to be included. Initially, only colleges in the 2008 CCSSE cohort (that is, institutions that have participated in the 2006, 2007 or 2008 survey administrations) will be featured. Nonetheless, we are contacting all CCSSE colleges so that all will be aware of this new development and have the opportunity to approve your college’s participation, now or in the future. Please provide your response to this special invitation, whether affirmative or not, no later than August 8, 2008. To respond, complete and sign the attached response sheet and return it to CCSSE by email to info@ccsse.org, fax (512.471.4209), or regular mail. (Please note: the form must have your signature, so if you choose to respond by email, please scan the signed document and send to us as a PDF attachment.) If after reviewing the enclosed materials and the USA TODAY web link provided above, you have questions or issues you would like to discuss, I would welcome your call (512.471.6687) or email message to kmcclenney@ccsse.org As always, thank you for your continued support of CCSSE and, more importantly, your commitment to community college student success! Sincerely, Kay M. McClenney Director