Higher Education Consortia
News and Updates for November & December 2015
National Study of Instructional Cost & Productivity –
The Delaware Cost Study
Participation in the 2015 cost study continues to grow at a steady rate.
Institutional commitment for the cost study is actively progressing as we confirm participation by our returning members and add many new institutions to the consortia. Many of our consortia members from the American Association of Universities (AAU), the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU), the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada ( AUCC), the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), the Higher Education Data Sharing consortia (HEDS), the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and the Southern University Group (SUG) have paid the participation fee and are busy working to collect and validate their data. Please contact Tom Eleuterio ( ) if you are would like to know about the status of a specific participant as you consider peer groups for benchmarking.
We continue to develop innovations impacting data submission in the 2015 cycle of the study.
UPDATE: New Fields definitions can now be found on the Definitions and Calculations Page of Delaware Cost Study website (http://ire.udel.edu/hec/definitions/).
We are requesting information to measure digital learning through the disaggregation of online student credit hour (SCH) productivity within the total SCH produced in the ‘origin of instruction’ methodology. We will ask institutions to report by discipline, an aggregation of all undergraduate and graduate SCH taught in a completely virtual mode for both the fall 2014 semester and for the academic/fiscal year for 2014-15. We will also ask for a report of the average number of degrees awarded, disaggregated by first major and then also for all degrees (first major, second major etc.) combined to produce a count of the average for all majors in each discipline. The data obtained in these two areas will permit an exploration of longitudinal change that may have been obscured due to the data definitions in these two areas. The results of these explorations will be used for assessing the quality our productivity metrics and will shared with consortia members.
UPDATE: Look for updated information on our new web portal in December, 2015.
The cost study data submission process will include the option of a web portal to provide an efficient method to upload and validate your data. This tool will facilitate a more flexible and timely review of submitted data. We will begin testing the portal with interested participants in late Fall 2015. Please e-mail Tom Eleuterio
( ) if you would like additional details on this option.
Faculty Activity Trifecta (FACT)
In 2015, the Higher Education Consortia (HEC) in the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness (IRE) at the University of Delaware began a multi-stage research project to develop a comprehensive measure of faculty activity outside of the classroom. Ultimately, this metric will be used to launch a study supplemental to the Delaware Cost study.
Additionally, this project builds upon findings from over five years of efforts to capture faculty activity outside of the classroom that were conducted by IRE from 2002 through 2007. This previous study, the Selected Measures of Out-of-Classroom Faculty Activity, summarized 42 different items measuring activities related to teaching, scholarship, and service. The data from this out-of-classroom faculty activity study provided a useful benchmarking tool to colleges and universities interested in better understanding their own faculty’s activity compared to the activity of peer institutions.
Recent pressure regarding the cost of employing university faculty has renewed a need for a more thorough understanding of how faculty are spending their time both inside and outside of the classroom. Our new study, the Faculty Activity Trifecta (FACT) study will allow colleges and universities to appropriately analyze the discipline-level faculty activity in the areas of instruction, scholarship, and service.
The first stage of this research involving deans and department chairs from around the country is in progress. A representative sample of many of the Carnegie Commission institutional types has been recruited for the study. The goal of this stage is to analyze the usefulness and effectiveness of certain metrics currently being used to measure faculty activity. With the assistance of an advisory committee, the data yielded from this research will guide the development of a new metric. Finally, subsequent research will test the various components, including the validity, of this new measure of faculty activity.
For more information about the FACT study or to express interest in participating in the FACT study advisory committee, please contact Jennifer Snyder at (302) 831-6894 or .
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