NSSE Data Helps Institutions Foster Minority Student Success: University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) officials in recent years created a minority mentoring program to connect students of color with business leaders in the community. The university recruited minority staff and students to work in its career center. It hired an adviser to work with minority student groups to ensure campus events reflected their interests.All of these changes came about due to data—survey data that, for instance, revealed minority students were not taking advantage of the career services center.
“There were certain sub-populations on campus that felt marginalized,” says Dr. Nathan Lindsay, director of student life assessment at the University of North Carolina Wilmington that has an 11 percent minority undergraduate enrollment. “Students who are Native America and Asian consistently across several different surveys produced lower scores in terms of their satisfaction level with services, in terms of feelings of being included or represented. It gave us greater cause to address those things.”
