WASC meeting in San Diego, 4/17-18/08 con't

Kathy O’Byrne, Director, Center for Community Learning, University of California, Los Angeles. Kathy talked about UCLA's involvement in Campus Compact.
http://www.compact.org/

Campus Compact is a national coalition of more than 1,100 college and university presidents — representing some 6 million students — dedicated to promoting community service, civic engagement, and service-learning in higher education.

Our job at Campus Compact is to educate college students to become active citizens who are well-equipped to develop creative solutions to society's most pressing issues.

We turn students into citizens

Our track record is unmatched. Over the past 20 years, Campus Compact has engaged more than 20 million students in service and service-learning, and participation rates keep rising. Each year, our member students work in thousands of communities, both locally and globally, to provide desperately needed services such as:

$7.1 billion

Estimated value of service contributed by students at Campus Compact member schools each year.

See: Annual Survey Statistics

• Tutoring at-risk youth in reading and math
• Building houses for low-income families
• Conducting environmental safety studies
• Caring for the sick, the hungry, the homeless, and the elderly

These students provide more than $7 billion annually in service within their communities. But they do more than volunteer. They build strong community partnerships. They lobby Congress. They start their own nonprofit agencies. They learn to apply their knowledge in ways that will bring about lasting change. And Campus Compact gives them the skills and resources to do it.

About VSA

http://www.voluntarysystem.org/index.cfm

The Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) communicates information on the undergraduate student experience through a common web reporting template, the College Portrait.

The VSA is a voluntary initiative for 4-year public colleges and universities. Developed through a partnership between the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), the VSA is designed to help institutions meet the following objectives:

• Demonstrate accountability and stewardship to public
• Measure educational outcomes to identify effective educational practices
• Assemble information that is accessible, understandable, and comparable

The Voluntary System of Accountability is designed to improve public understanding of how public colleges and universities operate.

The College Portrait provides consistent, comparable and transparent information on the characteristics of institutions and students, cost of attendance, student engagement with the learning process, and core educational outcomes. The information is intended for students, families, policy-makers, campus faculty and staff, the general public, and other higher education stakeholders.

The VSA project is collaborative effort among the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), and the public higher education community. Collectively AASCU and NASULGC represent over 525 public institutions that enroll 7.5 million students and award 70% of bachelor's degrees in U.S. each year.

About the College Portrait

http://www.voluntarysystem.org/index.cfm?page=about_cp

The data elements included in College Portrait were identified and evaluated based on input from student/family focus groups, feedback from the higher education community, and research on higher education.

The majority of the data elements selected are from currently available data sources with established definitions and reporting conventions, e.g., the Common Data Set.

For each VSA participating institution, the College Portrait reporting template will be five pages in length and organized into three primary sections: 1) consumer information, 2) student experiences and perceptions, and 3) student learning outcomes.

An Excel workbook is used to build the College Portrait. Data are entered into three worksheets and the College Portrait graphs and tables are automatically created through a visual basic macro. The generated worksheets are then converted to a pdf file and posted to the institution's website. The data entry template is available to VSA participants.