Adding one more "survey" to your institution's list may require you to help your administration recognize the ways your participation in the CSWC will be beneficial. What follows are various ways you might assemble a persuasive and compelling argument for your administration.
Perhaps most important, follow the principles of any good rhetorician and adapt your message to your specific audience and local situation. Explain how participation will benefit your school specifically. Connect the benefits of participation with specific initiatives and programs; connect to the specific local values and goals of your school, how it defines itself in its mission statement and similar documents; connect to the specific pressing needs and concerns your school faces.
Connect CSWC participation to these typical ways that universities and colleges use NSSE core-survey results (from page 1 of NSSE’s “Using NSSE Data”):
- Assessment and improvement
- General education reform
- Benchmarking
- Alumni outreach
- Accountability
- Grant writing
- Institutional research
- Institutional advancement
- Accreditation & self-studies
- Faculty and staff development
- Retention
- Communication with students
- Institutional communication
- State system performance reviews
Educate yourself about NSSE and the CSWC.
Consider addressing how the CSWC might address these general higher-education issues:
- Assessment in general: the CSWC survey results may provide data about writing, which is a skill that those inside and outside higher education recognize as important; it would be difficult or impossible to gather this data in any other way.
- Accountability systems. If your school is participating in one of accountability systems (such as the Voluntary System of Accountability, which produces the College Portrait), participation and results could be reported there.
- Accreditation and self-studies for the institution.
- Accreditation and self-studies for departments and colleges. College deans and college directors of assessment can provide support. If your institution has a school of engineering, business/management, or education, those schools have professional accrediting agencies that have increasingly stressed the importance of writing skills.
- Accreditation and self-studies for other programs and units. Similarly, if you have a new or high-profile first-year-experience program that stresses writing instruction, enlist their involvement. Programs that might be especially interested in using CSWC results include: first-year experience, learning communities, WAC/WID programs, faculty development, various colleges that have professional accrediting agencies, administrators of large government and other grants, and others.
- National visibility by participating in a nationwide research project.
Get written or oral support from deans, chairs, program directors, and other campus leaders. If you don’t have access to these campus leaders, speak with the person in their unit who is in charge of assessment or of faculty development.
- Consider asking these campus leaders to demonstrate their support with money. You could ask them to commit to paying for a certain portion of the consortium fee. For instance, for the largest institutions, the consortium fee is $500, which could be split five ways. It would be a small but meaningful gesture of support.
- Ask these leaders to demonstrate their interest by indicating interest in oversampling their students. NSSE’s “Oversampling Information” defines oversampling and explains why a school or unit would oversample. (Learn more about Oversampling. . . .)
- Remind them that participation is relatively free of risk: the cost is very reasonable, and your school is free to do with the data as they wish, including keeping it to themselves.
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