Longwood featured in Pew Charitable Trust Magazine

The recent Pew Charitable Trust magazine includes an article titled "Best College in the Country." It begins with senior Ron Hill describing his experiences at Longwood. These experiences are mostly in line with the high scores Longwood received on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) which the article reviews.

Writer Todd Shapera cites Longwood as a college that makes a good showing in the U. S. News & World Report rankings, but moves into the top 10 or 20 percent of all colleges and universities in the country when surveyed on factors "that academic research identifies as responsible for top-notch college learning experiences." These factors include faculty-student interactions, degree of academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, enriching educational experiences, a supportive campus environment, the development of work-related knowledge and skills, technology, civic virtue, and community involvement on campus.

Says Shapera, "The NSSE is a new assessment instrument in a crowded universe of assessments. It was created to evaluate something that other national surveys do not measure rigorously--the academic engagement of students in colleges and universities."

Longwood's Director of Assessment and Institutional Research Ed Smith says, "In 2000, our seniors rated Longwood at the 80th percentile or higher on nine NSSE benchmarks (five standard NSSE benchmarks and four developed exclusively for Longwood). Freshmen rated Longwood only slightly lower than seniors, rating Longwood at or above the 70th percentile on all but two benchmarks. In the spring of 2002, our freshmen and seniors are again completing NSSE on-line and providing the college with valuable information on their experiences at Longwood and the ways we can improve."

The article can be accessed on the Internet by clicking here.

For more on Longwood's NSSE data go to the following site: http://www.longwood.edu/assessment/NSSE_Main.htm.