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Viewbooks, rankings, and accountability measures cast colleges as distinctive and readily comparable. But the average student experience doesn't differ that markedly among institutions, says this year's National Survey of Student Engagement. Rather, the survey found, more than 90 percent of the variation in educational quality occurs among individual students on the same campus.
"The current climate really drives us to focus solely on interinstitutional comparisons," says Alexander C. McCormick, director of the survey. "That's what we're trying to complicate a little bit."
The annual report, known as "Nessie," releases only national averages of institutions' scores on "effective educational practice," but participating colleges and universities get individual results. Several hundred have opted to publicize them, a move the survey's National Advisory Board has encouraged.
This year's report uses data from real institutions, renamed Constitution University and Homestate College, to underscore its point about internal variation. At Constitution, for example, 70 percent of students in a special "educational opportunity" program for underrepresented and economically disadvantaged students said the campus provided substantial support for their social needs. Just 38 percent of all students said the same.
At Homestate, 75 percent of engineering students said they had frequent serious conversations with students from a different ethnic group. Among business students, only 58 percent did.
The report also identifies certain groups that lag behind the general undergraduate population...