Consortium on Quality Education Campus Statements

A. Campus description

Size

• 17,968 Undergraduate and 3, 869 Graduate students (Fall 1999 data)

  Structure

• The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is part of a statewide university system composed of three universities and a medical center. The system is headed by a president, a chancellor for each university, numerous vice-chancellors, deans, directors and chairs.
• The University of Nebraska is a Research I Ph.D. granting institution. There are nine undergraduate colleges offering 151 degree granting programs. The Graduate College offers 36 degree granting programs leading to the Ph.D., EdD, and DMA. The University conferred 4,180 degrees in its 1999-2000 fiscal year (3,115 bachelors; 685 masters; 148 professional; 251 doctorates and 8 other).
• UNL has 1,487 faculty (1200 full time and 287 part-time)

  Funding source

• The University of Nebraska -Lincoln, chartered by the Legislature in 1869, is that part of the University of Nebraska system which serves as both the land-grant and comprehensive public University for the State of Nebraska. Funding is provided through tuition, fees, and yearly allocations from the Nebraska Unicameral.

  Students served

• Age: The average age of an UNL student is 21.1; professional student is 26; and graduate student is 32 years of age.
• Full-time/part-time: The university has 18,278 full time students and 3,990 part- time students, the majority of which reside in Nebraska. Of the 22, 268 students, 1,742 are from foreign countries
• Gender: 11,617 men and 10,651 women attend UNL
• Level of preparation: ACT composite for first time freshman - 1999 average was 24.2; SAT for first time freshman - 1999 average was 1150.4
• Ethnicity: The majority of our students are white (85.2%); 4.9% are Asian; 2.3% are African-American; 2.0% are Hispanic; 0.5 are American Indian and 5.1% are unknown

  Freshman to sophomore retention rate

• As of Fall 2000, 81.3%

  Five year graduation rate or completion and transfer rate for community colleges

• Starting with the Fall cohort of 1994, the graduation rate is 39.09%

  Where students go after leaving your campus

• As of Fall 2000, NU graduates found employment in such areas, but not limited to Business and Industry, Government, Social Services, Graduate School, Teaching profession among others.

  Information on student movement (into, out of, and within your institution)

• To help students meet general education requirements; the University developed a Comprehensive Education Program (CEP) that was designed to ease the movement of students from one college to another with a limited amount of disruption to their academic matriculation. Because student movement between colleges and even within a particular college occur with great frequency, any data supplied would be unreliable.

B. Innovative practices related to Greater Expectations

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, prior to 1992, had no university-wide requirements and each of the university's nine colleges with undergraduate programs had distinctly designed general education requirements. The University developed a Comprehensive Education Program (CEP) in 1995 consisting of three major components: essential studies, integrative studies, and information discovery. See Part C of this document for an elaboration of these components. Additionally, we believed that much student learning occurs outside the classroom; therefore, we developed a co-curricular plan.

Since much learning occurs outside the classroom and based on data received from students taking ES courses in a few departments during their first two years, we saw natural clusters developing. Because students were taking the majority of their ES courses from a small number of departments this clustering provided an excellent opportunity to develop learning communities. In learning communities students co-enroll in at least two courses and participate in co-curricular activities with faculty from the academic department or college which sponsors the community. These learning communities center on various aims. Some communities were specifically designed to bring students in contact with faculty from professional colleges which do not typically offer freshmen level course work: e.g., College of Business Administration, College of Journalism and Mass Communications, College of Law. Other learning communities extend learning beyond the classroom through unique field experiences with faculty; e.g. biology. Still others intentionally create inter-disciplinary and team-taught courses to initiate a process of discovery; e.g., Visual Literacy is a community for all students entering the College of Architecture, art majors entering the College of Fine and Performing Arts and majors in clothing, textiles and design entering the College of Human Resources and Family Sciences. Learning communities that are residential where co-enrolled students live in the same residence hall have opportunities to interact with each other about common shared experiences in class and group study sessions, with peer mentors, and interact with faculty in activities in social settings but with an intellectual goal. This is a collaborative effort between the unit sponsoring the learning community and the Office of Student Affairs. We have a non-residential learning community such as our Alpha Program, open to all first-year students regardless of where they live.

The Honors Program and the J.D. Edwards interdisciplinary honors program in computer science and business management are residential programs for high achievers. To encourage challenging learning experiences and opportunities for students, a culture that is student-focused such as the College of Business Administration's Writing Lab (CBA), is used by the J.D. Edwards faculty to facilitate research and application of sophisticated math and computer science concepts to real-life problems by freshmen in the program. The CBA writing lab personnel hold doctorates in English and work closely with college faculty in designing student team assignments that develop critical thinking and communication skills.

To encourage students to become more involved in research, a 1999 competitive program was created called Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experiences (UCARE). This program is designed as a two-year program open to sophomores or juniors. During the first year, students work with faculty on their research, thus learning the research process; in the second year pursue their own individual research project or an extension of the one worked on the previous year. Students are compensated and the program has a committed $400,000 annual budget coordinated from the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor.

At the recommendation of the Freshman Experience Task Force, we developed "charter seminars" that would help first year students acclimate to university life. The seminars were designed from existing courses where students would enter small classes taught by credentialed professionals and having a specific academic theme. These classes would introduce students to the cultural and intellectual life of the university; foster the development of critical and research skills; and facilitate students' personal and social adjustment and professional development by discussion of social interaction on campus, exploration of values, engagement with diversity issues and other such activities. Chartering is innovative because it allows several first-year seminars, which meet Integrative Studies requirements.

The multi-institutional Peer Review of Teaching project, headed by faculty members at our institution, strives to extend the scholarship of teaching by exploring teaching effectiveness with the assessment of student outcomes rather than just course evaluations. This exploration leads faculty to document their teaching in portfolios, which are then reviewed by scholars at other institutions. This process of portfolio documentation and review creates the same atmosphere of scholarship that exists in the review process for a journal submission. For a brief discussion of this see the Bernstein and Edwards article in the January 5, 2001 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, section 2, page B 24.

C. Institutional learning goals and a brief description of the process followed to determine them

• The Comprehensive Education Program is designed so those students will meet distribution requirements and skill acquisitions. In order to complete the CEP portion, the degree requirements are divided into 3 areas: Essential Studies (ES), Information Discovery and Retrieval and Integrative Studies (IS). ES maps out a minimum experience for an undergraduate student in a broad range of university offerings. A student will take nine approved courses (generally 27 credit hours) across the curriculum that focus on: Communication; Mathematics and Statistics; Human Behavior, Culture and Social Organization; Science and Technology; Historical Studies; The Arts; Humanities; and Race, Ethnicity and Gender.
• The second part of the CEP program is Information Discovery and Retrieval. This is a one credit hour course where students learn not only how to use the library system on campus but also how to do research with emerging electronic databases. Students in several UNL colleges are required to take this course during their first year.
• The third and final component of CEP is called Integrative Studies (IS). IS courses are required and intended to engage students in actively developing their ability and desire to analyze, evaluate and communicate complex material and positions. A student will take ten Integrative Studies courses (usually 30 credit hours) to enhance the following skills: critical thinking; writing; oral expression, analysis of controversies; exploration of assumptions; inquiry through course content into the origins, bases and consequences of intellectual bias and consideration of human diversity. Students must take at least one approved course at the 200 level, one at the 300 level, and one at the 400 level and no more than three courses are to be taken within a single department.