Inquiring minds want to know. How did the college do last year in regard to Goal 2 — Student Centered Collegial Environment? Let’s take a look at the 2016 Institutional Effectiveness Report and find out!
The 2016 Institutional Effectiveness (IE) Report, posted on the college’s Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness webpage (www.hvcc.edu/secure/staff/assessment/plans/index.html), contains the answer to this question. And while we are confident that the document has been devoured voraciously by all members of the campus community, we thought we’d take a look at how we compare to last year on a few of the college’s key core indicators and summarize the results.
So, just to refresh our collective memory, exactly what are Core Indicators (CI)? Institutional effectiveness is in part assessed by examining the college’s performance on a key set of indicators, or Core Indicators, which tell us about our graduation and transfer rates, enrollment and retention data, student and employee satisfaction, Foundation and grant activity, and other important factors about the college. Hudson Valley’s CIs are organized around the college’s six goals — Teaching and Learning (Goal 1), Student-Centered Collegial Environment (Goal 2), Pluralism (Goal 3), Technology of Campus Environment (Goal 4), Administrative Services (Goal 5), and Relationships with the Community (Goal 6).
One of the key success indicators for the college is student success. Currently Goal 2 — Student Centered Collegial Environment is broken down into four Core Indicators: Student Enrollment (CI 2.1), Student Persistence (CI 2.2), Student Retention (CI 2.3), and Student Satisfaction (CI 2.4).
We’ll start with Student Enrollment (p. 16 of the IE Report). This CI consists of two measures: yield from acceptance (of applications), and enrollment (headcount and FTE). For fall 2015, the latest year for which data was available at the time of the writing of the report, the college saw a yield of 50%. In other words, 50% of students who applied and were accepted ended up enrolling for the fall 2015 semester. For fall 2014, 49% of applications resulted in enrollment. Because the benchmark and criteria for success was ‘Equal to or Greater than Previous Year’ on both measures, the college met the standard on this measure in 2016. However, the standard was not met for the second measure, headcount and FTE, as headcount for fall 2015 was 11,888 compared to fall 2014, which was 12,252, or 364 fewer enrollments, and total fall 2015 FTE was 8,104, 305 FTE fewer than fall 2014’s 8,409 FTE.
Core Indicators 2.2 and 2.3 address Student Persistence and Student Retention, respectively. What is the difference between student persistence and student retention? In general, persistence is continuation of student behavior leading to a desired goal (for our purposes here, graduation), and retention is percentage of students that re-enroll the next semester (fall to spring) or next academic year (fall to fall). Regarding student persistence (page 17 of the IE Report) at Hudson Valley, we use the standard measure, employed by SUNY, of average time to degree completion for first-time, full-time students, with a benchmark of 3.50 years. In other words, what is the average time it takes for first-time, full-time Hudson Valley students to complete an associate’s degree?
The latest data for this measure indicates that the average time to graduation for Hudson Valley students is 3.70 years, a slight decrease from the previous cohort, which was 3.71. So, in terms of the 3.50 benchmark, which we want to be at or below, we did not meet the standard. The other way in which we are measuring our success in this area is how we compare to our SUNY peer institutions (Erie, Monroe, Dutchess, Westchester, Onondaga, and Rockland; based on enrollment). Overall, Hudson Valley students earned a degree in a more timely manner than the majority of our six peer institutions, with only Dutchess and Onondaga students graduating in less time, on average (3.56 years for Dutchess and 3.39 years for Onondaga). The longest average time to degree completion was 4.36 years, for Westchester. The average time to degree for our six peer community colleges was 3.83 years.
Core Indicator 2.3 looks at student retention (page 18 of IE Report). To measure student retention, we look at what percentage of first-time, full-time students enroll in the following fall; for example, the number of first-time, full-time students who entered in fall 2014 that re-enrolled in fall 2015. For this group, consisting of 1,948 students, retention was 56.7%, as 1,105 students of the students entering fall 2014 re-enrolled in fall 2015. For the cohort who entered in fall 2013, consisting of 2,042 students, the retention rate was 56.5%, with 1,158 students re-enrolling in fall 2014. Since the benchmark used for this CI is the 2014 NCES (National Center for Educational Statistics) average retention rate for public two-year college (59%), we did not meet our benchmark, or criteria for success, nor did we in fall 2014, when the retention rate for students entering in fall 2013 was 56.5%. As far as our six peer institutions are concerned, all, with the exception of Erie, had higher retention rates for students entering both fall 2013 and fall 2014. Erie had a retention rate of 52.5% in fall 2014 and 54.4% in fall 2015. Overall, our six peer institutions had an average retention rate of 61.4% in fall 2014 and 61.3% in fall 2015.
The final CI in Goal 2 for the 2016 cycle was 2.4 Student Satisfaction (page 19 of the IE Report), utilizing seven items from the “College Impressions” section of the spring 2016 administration of the Student Opinion Survey (SOS). The College Impressions section contained seven items focusing on students’ overall impressions of Hudson Valley and was scored using a 5-point Likert Scale, as follows: Definitely Yes, 4 = Probably Yes, 3 = Uncertain, 2 = Probably No, and 1 = Definitely No. For the purposes of the Student Satisfaction Core Indicator, the benchmark was set at a minimum mean of 4.00, with the exception of Item 6, which, due to the nature of the question a decreased level of agreement indicates a positive change, and for which a benchmark of 2.50 was set. Student responses for each of the seven items of the spring 2016 administration were compared with two previous administrations of the survey.
For those items that were included in the 2010, 2013, and 2016 administrations of the SOS there was no increase or a small increase from 2010 to 2016. “Would you choose this college again” (Item 1) saw a mean of 4.19, increasing 0.16% from 2010’s 4.05; “impression of the quality of education at this college before you enrolled” (Item 2) remained steady at 3.52, and “impression once enrolled” (Item 3) increased 0.14% from 3.82 in 2010 to 3.96 in 2016. The final item, Item 7, regarding overall satisfaction with this college, saw an increase from 4.04 in 2010 to 4.15 in 2016, an increase of 0.11%.
Three items were added in 2013: Item 4, “has this college helped you achieve your goals,” which rose 0.24% from 3.90 in 2013 to 4.14 in 2016, Item 5, “comparing the cost to the quality of education is this college a good value” increased slightly (0.03%) from 4.53 to 4.56, and Item 6, “has is it been difficult to finance your education” also saw an increase, from 2.39 to 2.49.
In summary, Goal 2 — Student Centered Collegial Environment Core Indicators, with the exception of CI 2.1 Student Enrollment measure regarding yield, did not meet their benchmarks, although Student Satisfaction, CI 2.4, neared the benchmark, with only two items — impression of the quality of the college’s education before enrolling and impression of the same since enrolling — falling short, the latter only .04 shy of the benchmark. The majority of items showed improvement from previous administrations of the survey, including Item 4, “has this college helped you achieve your goals,” which increased 0.24% from 2014 to 2016. The remaining Goal 2 CI benchmarks — Student Enrollment, Student Persistence, and Student Retention, fell short of the benchmarks, although Student Retention saw a slight improvement and the Student Persistence rate had no significant change.
These core indicators — student enrollment, persistence, retention and satisfaction — will continue to be assessed on an annual basis in the Institutional Effectiveness Report.
Our next article will look at how the college did on Goal 1 — Teaching and Learning Core Indictors, which include graduation rate, transfer rate, transfer and job placement rate combined, professional licensure/certification passing rates, and employee satisfaction.
If you have any questions or want to offer some feedback please don’t hesitate to contact the Office of the Vice President for Technology and Institutional Assessment and Planning at 629-7151 or by email at m.geehan@hvcc.edu.
Published: Tue, 06 Dec 2016 13:05:00 +0000 by m.geehan