Class Struggle: more student engagement

There is no better gauge to what is happening on U.S. college campuses than the National Survey of Student Engagement. It is full of surprises. (My recent favorite: having a helicopter parent is GOOD for your academic experience, NSSE discovered.) This year, based on forms filled out of 362,000 students on 564 campuses, the survey finds that the kinds of students I thought would be getting the most help---military veterans and new students in trouble---are often getting the least.

No Child Left Behind, the most influential and infuriating federal education law in 40 years, is not quite dead, but getting close. The Obama administration and Congress say they will discard it soon for something different. Nobody's paying much attention to it any more. The term AYP has fallen out of favor among us education writers.

If you are, as the law school applicant in my family has begun to call them, a prestige whore, then I guess the U.S. News & World Report America's Best Colleges rankings are for you. Those lists are based heavily on what colleges think of each other---what is called the reputational score. The higher the rank, the wider the smile on your grandmother's face when you get in. But if you want an introduction to a lesser known, but to my mind more useful, rating of undergraduate institutions, take a close look at the National Survey of Student Engagement.