New Report Suggests College Students Are Studying More

A report of the 2019 results from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) was released last week, and it contains encouraging news about the extent to which college students are engaging in their education and colleges are supporting them as they do.

The NSSE is an annual survey that asks first-year and senior students at hundreds of four-year schools to evaluate how much they believe their education contributed to abilities such as “writing clearly and effectively,” “thinking critically and analytically,” and preparing them with work-related skills. Other NSSE items tap how often students interact with faculty, attend artistic and cultural events, and engage in activities like studying, working, socializing and completing internships, service projects, and extracurricular activities. The continuing emphasis of the survey is assessing how often students are engaged in educationally purposeful behaviors – both in and outside of the classroom.

The 2019 administration marks NSSE’s 20th year, so it allowed the NSSE team to study some long-term trends in student engagement. Although many questionnaire items have been modified over the years, a few dozen have remained relatively unchanged.

These items were used in a longitudinal study with data from 1,583 U.S. colleges and universities that participated in the NSSE between 2004 and 2019. The number of institutions per year ranged from 461 (2004) to 725 (2008), averaging about 580 per year. Data from more than five million respondents were collected during this time period, with an annual average of 316,770. In 2019, students from 531 schools took the NSSE.

In higher education today, student engagement is understood to mean extended, intensive experiences like research assistantships, mentoring, study away, service learning, senior projects, or taking part in a themed learning community. Colleges have prioritized this kind of so-called “high-impact” learning because it promotes stronger connections between students and faculty, and it’s associated with various measures of student success.

In a previous Forbes post, I suggested that another form of student engagement is also linked to educational progress. It’s quaintly called studying - spending time doing required readings, writing assigned papers, solving math problems and even - contrary to pedagogic fads - memorizing material in preparation for quizzes and exams.

Now, thanks to the longitudinal data from NSSE, we have preliminary information about trends in how often students engage in various forms of student engagement. Three experiences appeared to have increased over time: first-year interactions with faculty, time spent on academic preparation, and perceptions of the campus environment. Here’s a bit more on what was found.

First-year students’ interactions with faculty

Three types of first-year students’ interactions with faculty have showed notable positive trends: talking about career plans, discussing course topics outside of class, and working with faculty on activities other than coursework. The portion of first-year students who interacted frequently (“very often” or “often”) in each of these areas increased by more than 10 percentage points between 2004 and 2019.

It appears that faculty who teach first-year course are taking more time to have meaningful conversations with students outside of the classroom, and students are reciprocating. This form of engagement has been found to help socialize new students and promote their persistence in school.

Time Spent Studying

Students are devoting more time to academic preparation than they did over a decade ago. For example, the percentage of first-year students spending more than 15 hours per week preparing for class (studying, reading, writing, doing homework or lab work) increased from 34% in 2004 to as high as 45% in 2017. The researchers found that seniors also increased their time spent studying over this time frame.

The increases for both groups have plateaued in the past few years, but the 10 percentage point increase translates into about two more hours per week for all students on average.

This finding is particularly welcome because previous NSSE analyses have found - not surprisingly - that the average amount of time first-year students spend on academic preparation is strongly correlated with a school’s retention and graduation rates.

Perceptions of the Campus Environment

Finally, the survey revealed two positive trends regarding perceptions of campus environment. First, students increasingly rated their campuses’ emphasis on diverse interactions as substantial (“very much” or “quite a bit”), rising more than 10 points for both first-year students and seniors. Seniors’ perceptions of substantial institutional emphasis on diverse interactions increased from 43% to 55% across the last decade and a half.

Second, students’ belief that their institutions provided support for helping them manage nonacademic responsibilities such as work or family also increased. Looking at seniors, whose years on campus probably give them a better opportunity to judge institutional supportiveness than first-year students, the percentage answering “very much” or “quite a bit” about how much support institutions provided for their nonacademic responsibilities increased from 23% to a high of 33% before leveling off in recent years. Given the changing demographics of higher education, with historically underrepresented and older students enrolling in larger numbers, that progress is important.

The latest NSSE results deserve closer scrutiny on three fronts.

1. As encouraging as the increases are, a glass-half full-problem remains -too many undergraduates remain relatively unengaged, study too little, and feel inadequately supported in college. The NSSE results show that it’s time to rev up the engines, not take a victory lap.
2. The improvements may signal an awakening among students themselves that to make college fully worth the time and expense, they need to ramp up their own participation. Students may be recognizing that the more they participate in the high-impact experiences that colleges are offering, the more they are likely to succeed.
3. Colleges and universities that improve the quality of their students’ experiences can reap several benefits. Institutions that strengthen advising and orientation, encourage the early, purposeful choice of majors, and connect students to financial, counseling, and career supports when they are needed are more likely to see students improve their academic performance.