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Tag: Student Experience

Student Surveys We’d Like to See

Surveys of current students tend to focus on just a few areas. Apart from questions about demographics and time use, they ask a lot of specific questions about satisfaction with student services along with a few general questions about overall satisfaction. This is odd, because at the end of the day students don’t actually think student services are central to the overall quality of their PSE experience. What they care about first and foremost is the quality of the teaching

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January 18, 2012 No Comments

No More Boring Surveys

As most of you probably know, we at HESA spend a lot of our time working on surveys. While doing so, we see a lot of different types of survey instruments, especially from governments and institutions. And we’ve come to a major conclusion: Most of them are really boring. There was a time – say fifteen years ago– when doing surveys of applicants, graduates and alumni was relatively rare. There weren’t any surveys of satisfaction, or engagement, or anything else,

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January 16, 2012 No Comments

Fun with Class Size Data

Yesterday, I promised to show you some of the data on our alternative measure of class size (see here for more details). Some preliminaries, though: Our measure of “average number of classmates” may be a bit crude (it depends on student estimates of class sizes), but it is robust. Institutional averages bounce around by a few percent each year, but long-term averages – which at most institutions involve between two and four thousand observations – are pretty stable. To avoid

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January 6, 2012 1 Comment

The 160 Student Solution

Here’s an important question. Why do we care about how many classes a professor teaches? Virtually every university collective agreement has some kind of minimum or average or desirable teaching load – 2+3, 2+2, etc. It doesn’t really matter since so many professors are buying their way out of these anyway and going down to one class a term. Regardless, though, the unit of analysis here is the course. This makes absolutely no sense. Universities don’t get paid based on

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September 20, 2011 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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