the role of student affairs and services in higher education

SECTION IV – RESEARCH, EVALUATION, ASSESSMENT, AND
STRATEGIC PLANNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
STUDENT AFFAIRS AND SERVICES
Fundamental to any profession is the capacity and willingness to objectively
assess and evaluate program and service delivery. The student affairs and
services profession is no different. This staff of professionals provides a most
critical and valuable early warning system to university management on issues
affecting students and their social and learning environments. In the forefront of
assessment and evaluation is data collection that allows comparison and
benchmarking among services. Recently, attention of student affairs and
services has turned directly to the improvement of student learning outcomes
through educational programming that is intended to facilitate the learning goals
of the institution. Thus, outcomes assessment also has become a tool for these
staff members. Accordingly, student affairs and services, because of its central
mission, is one of the most appropriately positioned entities for the collection of
meaningful student data that, once evaluated and understood, can be used in
appropriate research and program development.
Some of the actual assessment techniques that are commonly used in student
affairs and services include mail and on-line surveys, focus groups, individual
interviews, writing samples including personal journaling, portfolios, project
development, benchmarking, demography, and other comparative studies, and
more traditional testing. In order to improve programs and services and
determine if students have learned the intended outcomes resulting from those
programs and services, information and data are collected to:
• determine the effectiveness of promotional material
• establish demand, need, focus, and applicability; gauge student satisfaction
• assess quality of effort; determine program success rates
• benchmark current practices against the best at other institutions
• track the number of students attending programs; monitor waiting lists
• monitor the sources of student referrals; monitor outside agency referrals
• determine student attrition and retention rates; track graduation rates
• receive student feedback on key issues and ideas, assess unmet needs
• assess campus learning and physical environments; assess learning outcomes
• track student employment rates upon graduation
RESEARCH AND DATA COLLECTION
The higher education system across the globe has increasingly experienced a
transition from an elitist system to a mass or nearly universal system, with the
result that the traditional view of the student has been changing. Widening
participation strategies have seen a diversification of the student body not only in
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