Community engagement runs through your curriculum, your faculty workload, and your accreditation evidence, and almost never appears in a form you can compare. The NASCE gives you a measured account of where engagement is deep, where it is thin, and how your campus reads beside institutions that resemble it.
Two of our audience pages overlap by title, so we separate them by portfolio instead.
If the community engagement budget line sits in your unit, and authorizing an assessment of it is your decision to make, the page written for you is For Senior Engagement Officers. It covers price, staff burden, and what the money buys.
This page is written for academic leadership: the provost, the vice provost, and the deans who care how engagement connects to coursework, faculty effort, program review, and the evidence an accreditor will ask for. The budget question is on the other page. The academic question is here.
The NASCE measures three things for every area of service: whether a student serves, how often, and how deeply. Those three dimensions are what make the result usable for academic decisions rather than only for reporting.
Depth separates a one-time drive from a regular commitment and from sustained, dedicated involvement. Community-engaged coursework is designed to produce the third kind and is often evaluated as though it produced the first.
Frequency runs from once or twice a year to more than once a week. Read against your academic calendar, it shows whether engagement is concentrated in a few designated weeks or carried through the term.
Scores come back for each of eight areas of human need. The shape across those areas is where the academic conversation usually starts, because the thin areas are frequently the ones with no course, no partner, and no faculty lead attached to them.
Before fielding, your office completes a customization form that names your majors and the engagement opportunities students can actually choose on your campus. The instrument is built around your academic structure, so the results come back in your own categories.
Engagement evidence for units whose self-studies claim community connection, drawn from students rather than from program descriptions.
A campus-level view of where community-engaged teaching is concentrated, which is the first step toward deciding where it should be supported or rewarded.
Frequencies and crosstabulations go to institutional research with the report, so your analysts can run the cuts your deans ask for.
The POP score reports how much students serve. The Engaged Global Citizen battery, included with a core administration, reports the civic disposition beneath the service: how students think about diversity, critical thought, political involvement, and social justice. For academic leadership the pairing is the useful part, because it shows where students hold a value that their behavior has not yet followed.
Tell us your enrollment and your academic calendar, and we will map an administration to it. We will walk your deans through what the results mean for their programs.
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