NSSE 2008 Pocket Guide

NSSE helps colleges and universities reflect on the needs and expectations of its current students and to measure whether those expectations are being met. More recently, NSSE data have been used to help prospective students during the admission process. NSSE’s new guide, A Pocket Guide to Choosing a College: Are You Asking the Right Questions on a College Campus Visit? lists a number of questions that research over the last 30 years has shown to be positively related to high levels of student learning and development during college. It is intended to help prospective college students and their parents to think more about these types of questions during the college decision-making process.

The Pocket Guide was created as part of an ongoing public awareness campaign to refocus the national conversation about what constitutes quality in the college experience. Asking the right questions on your campus visits will help you to dig deeper and get beyond statistics, creating the opportunity for dialogue in the admission process and helping students to understand a school’s quality, rather than just facts and figures.

Ultimately, the admissions process is a balance between your head and your heart: finding the right “fit.”  The Pocket Guide helps address a deeper level of the student experience that guidebooks and other research won’t provide.

To access the JCU data and answers to the Pocket Guide questions (Adobe PDF format),
please click here.

Links to learn more about the Pocket Guide project:

• A Pocket Guide to Choosing a College
  
  
• Beyond rankings: A new way to look for a college
  
  
• Access to other college and university NSSE data

To learn more about John Carroll, visit http://www.jcu.edu/admission/learn/index.htm