Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Project and Consortium

What Makes UCUES Unique?

SERU Home | SERU Consortium & AAU Invitation | SERU Research Team | SERU Project Summary | UCUES | UCUES Data | Reports & Papers | In the News

CSHE > Research > The Research University > SERU > UCUES > What Makes UCUES unique?

"The accreditation process is aimed at promoting within institutions a culture of evidence where indicators of performance are regularly developed and data collected to inform decision-making, planning, and improvement."
A Guide to Using Evidence in the Accreditation Process: A Resource to Support Institutions and Evaluation Teams, January, 2002.

If a survey is to be part of a culture of evidence, it has to be part of institutional culture, and it is exceedingly hard to influence the culture of a large public research university. WASC describes two necessary conditions before information can be widely and regularly used in decision-making. First, there must first be a body of information. Second, the campus must be aware of and have access to that information. And third, there must accompany the effort of a survey instrument like UCUES an analytical framework and active research program to utilize the data in ways that further policy analysis and scholarly investigation.

Via the UCUES instrument, the Student Experience in the Research University project is designed to fulfill all three of these needs and, further, to route that effort in a scholarly viewpoint, and not simply as an administrative function.

UCUES offers the first systematic environmental scan of the undergraduate experience at the University of California and the first in-depth analysis of the varied types and levels of undergraduate student academic and civic engagement in a major public university system.

In developing and first administering UCUES, the SERU Research Team and collaborators are particularly sensitive to illuminating the advantages as well as the challenges for undergraduate education inherent in the large public research university in the 21st Century.

The research design of the UCUES draws on academic research to inform and expand the ambitions of the University in improving the undergraduate experience. The project is an initiative that is collaborative with administrative units, yet based at an academic research unit (The Center for Studies in Higher Education), combining interests in both policy analysis and scholarship. This collaboration is important for promoting institutional knowledge on the undergraduate experience, and for creating and integrating creative scholarship that asks difficult yet important questions.

UCUES thus offers a new and different survey instrument and a research design focused on research universities, and that builds on survey work previously pursued separately by campus institutional research offices and in national surveys, in turn creating a more powerful and meaningful database. For example, the survey design:

• Online Census Approach: UCUES is an on-line survey that sent to approximately 160,000 undergraduate students across the UC system. With response rate of nearly 50 percent, the survey provides a broad and deep data resource valuable for a great variety of institutional and scholarly purposes, including program review and accreditation.

• Quantitative and Qualitative Research Design: Open-ended questions provide opportunities for garnering important observations and ideas from students on how to improve their academic and civic experience.

• Longitudinal Perspective: UCUES provides an extremely important UCwide benchmark as the multi-campus system enters a dramatic period of enrollment and demographic growth and as campuses incorporate potentially significant changes in instructional technologies and other teaching and learning innovations. With its eight and soon to be nine undergraduate campuses, the University of California offers a rich laboratory for investigating the changing nature of undergraduate education in the American research university.

• Integration with Institutional Database: Integrates students’ survey responses with existing institutional data relating to their social and academic backgrounds and academic outcomes over time.

• Research Perspective: Multiple Experiences in the Research University: The scale of modern research universities is such that any analysis of the undergraduate experience must take into account that there are many experiences, with variables such as race, gender, major, socio-economic background, career orientation, civic engagement, all shaping the academic experience of students. UCUES, and the SERU Project, developed UCUES to offer a finely grained comparative analysis of student experience, satisfaction, engagement and achievement.