I have two presentations this spring with colleagues from Wake Forest University on work concerning college student wellbeing.  

A front-page article on Sunday (November 15, 2014) about college admissions (Applications by the Dozen, as Anxious Seniors Hedge College Bets) claims that a lot of high school seniors these days are applying to “more colleges than anyone would have previously thought possible.”  The sidebar proclaims that there is “a perfect storm of ambition, neuroses and fear among high school students.” Yikes!

Institutional identity drives the kinds of students who apply for admissions, the types of faculty who apply for jobs, which organizations are interested in contributing funding for research, and the benefactors that donate to support that mission. The faculty, students and administrators at this school know their institutional identity and live it on a daily basis.

You can change what you can't measure. But you might not be as effective at that change if you don't measure it somehow.  My career in higher education has, for 25 years, focused on conducting research and evaluation in order to provide information for decision makers at colleges and universities.  At the local level, at Dartmouth, I created the office of student affairs planning, evaluation, and research.  I worked with faculty, administrators, and trustees at all levels of the spectrum of change.  Starting with defining and refining the basic question, conducting research through surveys, focus groups, interviews, and observation and refining what we know, we then create ways to measure if we were successful in making change happen.