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Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Project

The SERU Consortium, based at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, is a joint and institutional undertaking spanning several years. The Consortium includes a peer group of top-ranked and progressive U.S. and international major research universities. Consortium members are devoted to creating new data sources and policy-relevant analyses to help broaden our understanding of the undergraduate experience and to promote a culture of institutional self-improvement. Consortium members administer an online census customized for each campus (the SERU Survey, and known within the UC system as the UCUES—the University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey), collaborate in further development of survey topics and questions, share best practices and data under agreed protocols, collaborate in policy symposiums, and engage in collective research on major challenges facing research universities.

Mission

The SERU Project aims to generate new, longitudinal information on the undergraduate experience at research universities - via a census-based survey - to be used by administrators, policy makers, and scholars -- with the intention to help improve the undergraduate experience and educational processes.

Contemporary efforts to study the undergraduate experience are aimed primarily at providing data for assessment of institutional functions, or to answer relatively specific questions about aspects of students' behaviors, satisfaction, and achievement. There is a paucity of systematic data about the ways students today perceive and experience the academic demands, intellectual claims and opportunities the university provides, and about the norms students themselves construct and how these shape their uses of the university. Methods to understand how students’ perceptions and experiences change over their tenure as students at research universities are even more rare.

The SERU project provides a continuing study that links new and existing data sources, providing tools for the following:

UNDERSTANDING WHO STUDENTS ARE: Creating a much fuller understanding of our undergraduate population – their familial, academic, cultural, and ethnic background as well as their self-identity DISAGGREGATING THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE: More fully exploring how undergraduates’ experience in terms of their behaviors, expectations, and satisfaction levels is affected by the academic and administrative practices of the research university and, conversely, how their behaviors and interests influence the academic milieu. TRANSLATING KNOWLEDGE INTO POLICY: Analyzing and using data that can help identify strengths and weaknesses of undergraduate programs that can be integrated into policymaking and that help guide policy-relevant research.

The research provides important information about how students of diverse backgrounds and with varying economic pressures and competing obligations organize their time, define their academic purposes, respond to the curriculum and the extra-curricular opportunities for intellectual development, and make use of the resources of the institution. This information is collected through a survey of undergraduates enrolled at the nine undergraduate campuses of the University of California and participating institutions of the SERU consortium.

"As we build a longitudinal database, the potential grows for addressing a wide range of questions about the value-added of a UC education and the differential educational experiences of various sub-populations within and across the nine UC undergraduate campuses." -- Council of Vice Provosts and Deans of Undergraduate Education, University of California

History

The idea of a UC-wide survey that focused on the academic and civic engagement of undergraduate students at the University of California was first explored in 1999 by John Aubrey Douglass (Senior Research Fellow at CSHE) and Richard Flacks (Professor of Sociology at UCSB).

Douglass identified the need for improved information on the student experience throughout the UC system as it entered a new era of enrollment growth and financial constraints. Flacks had surveyed work on UCSB students, exploring issues of student engagement, and had ideas on how such a University-wide survey might be constructed.

By early 2000, Douglass and Flacks proposed the development of an online survey as a collaborative project between faculty and institutional researchers located at an academic research unit, Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE). The goal was to develop a new University-wide resource on the character and experience of students within research universities, one that made use of existing institutional data and that would help promote both scholarly and policy-based research, and, ultimately, institutional improvement.

At the time, a number of campuses did student surveys, but they were not coordinated, and generally did not incorporate a larger theoretical framework for analyzing the dynamics of both the academic and civic engagement of students.

Under a proposal forwarded by John Douglass at CSHE, seed funding was provided by Associate Vice President Dennis Galligani at the UC Office of the President to explore the viability of a University-wide survey, which, in turn, led to a meeting of some 30 faculty and institutional researchers from throughout the UC system. UCUES logoThey recommended that CSHE researcher Douglass work with collaborators to create a proposal for the development of what has since become known within the UC system as the University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES).

By early 2001, Gregg Thomson, Executive Director of the Office of Student Research and Campus Surveys (OSR-CS) at UC Berkeley, was asked to join as a co-Principal Investigator, in part because of the innovative survey work being conducted at OSR-CS. In 2006, Steven Brint, a Professor of Sociology at UC Riverside, joined the principal researchers.

In late 2001, CSHE presented a proposal for a Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Project to be located at CSHE with one of its primary goals to develop what became UCUES and later what is known as the SERU Survey. The UC Office of the President and the Student Affairs offices on each of the eight undergraduate campuses subsequently funded the proposal jointly.

The SERU Project principal researchers established a Universitywide advisory committee chaired by Neil Smelser (Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley) with faculty, administrative and student representatives, and proceeded to work closely with an institutional research work group and interested faculty to develop the survey as a pilot.

The Survey was first administered in the spring of 2002 as a sample, online survey under a contract with the Social Science Survey Center at UC Santa Barbara.

Since then, the UCUES has become a census, online survey sent to all UC undergraduates and administered by OSR-CS at UC Berkeley in coordination with the UC Office of the President and each participating campus. The UCUES is among the few, if only, surveys designed as a longitudinal study on the student experience at research universities.

In 2008, the SERU Project expanded the number of institutions administering the Survey, forming a consortium of large, research universities that includes several AAU institutions in addition to the nine undergraduate UC campuses. Although still referred to as the UCUES in the UC system, the survey instrument is largely known outside of the UC System as the SERU Survey.

A SERU/UCUES Institutional Research Work Group helps coordinates the implementation of the Survey at the UC campus level, provides input into the development of the survey instrument, and reports results for their campuses.

Coordination with each of the campuses, and the support of the University of California Office of the President, has been crucial in making UCUES/SERU Survey a regularly administered survey.

"One of the primary findings of the SERU Project's earlier research is that there are many student experiences within a campus - and, therefore, any useful analysis requires a large and longitudinal data set to allow for disaggregating student responses. Campus-wide gauges of student satisfaction, for example, are largely meaningless. The Survey’s state-of-the-art online census design provides a relatively low-cost means for reaching all students and important subgroups, creating a detailed data set with large benefits for participating campuses." - SERU Research Team

SERU Consortia

There are two SERU Consortia. The SERU-AAU Consortium was established in 2000 to develop a survey of students in the research university environment, and to promote both institutional and scholarly uses of the data to help improve undergraduate education.

The SERU-AAU Consortium includes 25 major US research universities, all of which are members of the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU). Consortium members include: University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Davis; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Merced; University of California, Riverside; University of California, San Diego; University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California Office of the President; Rutgers University; University of Florida; University of Michigan; University of Minnesota; University of Oregon; University of Pittsburgh; University of Texas; University of Southern California; University of North Carolina; University of Virginia; Texas A&M University; University of Iowa; Purdue University; Indiana University; and the University of Washington.

Each SERU-AAU Consortium campus administers a customized, online census SERU Survey, collaborates in further development of survey topics and questions, shares best practices and data under agreed protocols, collaborates in policy symposiums, and engages in collective research on major challenges facing research universities.

In 2010, the SERU-International (SERU-I) Consortium was formed and includes top-ranked research universities in China, Brazil, Europe, and South Africa who share the following objectives:


 * Develop and administrator an online, census, and customized version of the SERU survey of first-degree students for international research universities, parallel to the SERU Surveys in the US.
 * Conduct research on the student experience, sharing best practices via SERU meetings, symposia, and joint-research projects intended to inform and drive institutional self-improvement in undergraduate education and broaden our understanding of the socioeconomic impact of these institutions.
 * Collaborate with SERU-AAU Consortium members in the generation and sharing of institutional, comparative, and longitudinal data on the student experience, including SERU surveys of students, and based on agreed data sharing protocols.

The SERU-I Consortium held its first international conference on Oct 4-5, 2012 on the Berkeley campus.