Access to Public Universities in the Chronicle

After three years working at a large private institutions, I decided I was committed to working at large, flagship public institutions.  I graduated from one of these (UW Madison) and have worked at two (UC Berkeley, UW Madison).  I know that there’s a lot that’s unique to these institutional environments when it comes to information literacy initiatives.  And I’d like to believe that we’re part of an important enterprise to provide a high-quality education to a broad population of students — education as a public good.   There’s a lot of data out there that demonstrates that we’re not living up to this ideal.

This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education includes several articles on this topic.  Universities at Risk: Seven Damaging Myths, is by Christopher Neufeld, who just wrote a book Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008). The other is “Public Universities at Risk: Abandoning Their Missions.”  That article (“commentary,” not a research study) takes a look at equity in access to education at large, flagship institutions like our own.

Referencing an Education Trust report, “Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities,” the author writes, “our flagship public universities have become less accessible to low-income and minority students since 1995.”    There has been a decline in enrollment of Pell Grant-eligible students and public universities have become “less representative of the racial composition of the nation’s high-school graduates.”  This challenges some of our assumptions and ideals about the environment where we work.

At our WiscNet presentation about K-20 information literacy, Jo Ann Carr presented some statistics about the UW system that painted an even more depressing picture.  UW Madison, our flagship, fits this picture.  But if I remember correctly enrollment at the colleges is even less diverse than that at UW Madison.  I’ll ask Jo Ann to share those stats with us in a broader forum, because it’s so important for us to have a realistic picture of the characteristics of the students we’re working with.

ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT ‘08

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT 2008 was released today.  You can link to the key findings here, but the full findings are also freely available online.

This year’s study includes some information literacy questions based on the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.  At first glance (I haven’t read the full report yet), these look like student self-report of selected items related to searching web-based sources (freely available and licensed databases).  Here’s what they found:

• 79.5% rate themselves highly for their ability to “use the Internet effectively and efficiently to search for information,” with almost half rating themselves as “very skilled” and another third rating themselves as “experts.”
• About half of respondents also say they are “very skilled” or “expert” when it comes to “evaluating the reliability and credibility of online sources of information” or “understanding the ethical and legal issues surrounding the access and use of digital information.”

I’m looking forward to examining this section more closely, but if anyone else gets to it first I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

This year’s report also includes a special focus on social networking sites.  One of the PIs for this study, Judy Caruso, is right here at Madison and I heard her talk about ECAR last year at a brownbag.

UW Alumni Profiles Project

Thought this excerpt from a press release about 2008 Alumni profiles was interesting…  http://apa.wisc.edu/Alumni/alumni_profiles.html

“Alumni Profiles answer some broad questions about where undergraduate alumni live, if they are employed or enrolled in educational programs, and how much they value their UW-Madison education.   Alumni Profiles are available for schools and colleges and for undergraduate majors.”

Among UW-Madison alumni who graduated within the past 10 years: (a few highlights)

• 88% are employed full-time (81%) or part-time (7%).  Nearly half of alumni have provided detailed employer and job title information
• 80% of those employed say that the skills they developed at UW-Madison in problem solving, written and verbal communication, and other general skills are related or highly related to their current position
• 59% of those employed say that their current position is related or highly related to the major of their UW-Madison degree

Voluntary System of Accountability Report

I learned last week that UW-Madison is participating in the Voluntary System of Accountability and created a College Portrait of Undergraduate Education.

In November, 2007, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on the system (subscription, also in Lexis-Nexis and other online databases): “In one of the most sweeping responses yet to calls for accountability in higher education, a public-university association has adopted a template, called the College Portrait, that will allow institutions to share with outsiders online data about such matters as students’ academic progress.  Use of the portrait will be voluntary, but its approval this month by the Board of Directors of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges marked the beginning of a formal effort by the association to encourage institutions to use it.”

The short portrait includes data on the campus, as well as data related to student learning outcomes from three standardized instruments.  Perhaps more significantly, it includes data on how UW Madison intends to measure student learning outcomes locally.   For those who have been following the ongoing struggle over accountability measures in higher ed, this represents institutions’ push to be proactive in defining and controlling their own measures of student learning, rather than having something imposed from the outside.   Here at UW, the effort to supplement long, scholarly reports on student learning outcomes with shorter “nuggets” to share with the public is a very important campus effort.

“College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks”

Primary Research Group has released a report, “College Information Literacy Efforts – Benchmarks.” The report got a posting in Wired Campus, which is widely read in higher ed, focusing on credit classes in community colleges (up 38% last year) and all types of institutions (5% offer a credit class). It’s interesting that this mode of instruction has increased so much in community colleges, but doesn’t seem that prevalent in higher ed as a whole.

The executive summary of the report has a few nuggets that I found particularly relevant:

• “over 23% of the sample required information literacy training integrated into basic writing or composition courses.”
• “Nearly 48% of the colleges sampled offered interactive tutorials in information literacy topics to students. Just a third of bachelors-granting colleges offered such tutorials, while 6 out of 10 research universities did so.”
• “The vast majority of the sample, nearly 84%, reported that the library was not really involved with computer technology training on campus.”

The full report is $75… maybe we will get it or we can order it through ILL…. Thanks to Karen for prompting me to look into this more deeply.