The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Benchmarks has emerged as a competing paradigm for assessing institutional effectiveness vis-a-vis the U.S. News & World Report. However, Porter (2009) has critiqued it for failing to meet validity and reliability standards. This study investigated whether the NSSE five benchmarks had construct…

Since Summerskill's study on college attrition forty years ago, the interest in this topic has never waned. This study was particularly interested in the relationship of race to retention. Various theoretical frames of references have been proposed: Price's organization theory, Durkheim's Suicide, and Marx's Alienation have been used to guide…

In this article, we report on a study about the experiences of graduating sociology majors with out-of-class learning opportunities (OOCLO). Research questions included the following: (1) What is the nature of participation in out-of-class learning for our sociology majors? (2) What barriers do students see to engaging in such experiences? (3)…

While there exist many examples of institutional use of the results of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), there is a relative paucity of research explicitly linking student outcomes to responses on the survey. A major Doctoral-Extensive institution in the Southeast recently conducted a large-scale implementation of the National…