The NASCE turns a stated commitment to community engagement into a measured picture: how many students serve, how often, and how deeply, across eight areas of human need. This is how one survey response becomes a score you can carry to a board, an accreditor, and a Carnegie application.
For every area of service, the NASCE asks the same three questions. Together they tell whether service on a campus is occasional and shallow or frequent and deeply rooted, which a simple count of volunteer hours never shows.
Whether a student serves at all, measured in each of the eight areas.
How often that service happens, on a six-level scale from once or twice a year to more than once a week.
Whether the involvement is a single event, a regular commitment over time, or a sustained and dedicated relationship.
Students answer on these six levels. Scoring collapses them to four, combining levels 2 and 3 and levels 5 and 6. A report that prints four frequency categories is showing the scored form, and the six-level wording above is what students actually saw.
The three dimensions combine into one number for the institution. The path from a single answer to that number is short and transparent.
In every area, a student's participation is combined with how often they serve and how deeply, producing a value for that area.
The eight area values sum into that student's engagement score, a full account of the service one person carries.
Student scores aggregate into a single institutional POP score, benchmarked against the national dataset.
Of all the community engagement your students could be doing, how much is actually happening? The POP score answers that in one number, on a scale you can read at a glance and defend in detail.
The POP score captures how much students serve. The companion EGC battery measures four civic dimensions that sit alongside it: diversity, critical thought, political involvement, and social justice. Each one is scored twice, once for what students report doing and once for how much importance they place on it, so the two columns together show where a stated commitment has outrun the experience behind it.
See the Engaged Global Citizen →Co-directed by Dr. Mathew Johnson and Dr. Donald Levy.
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