The reasons why students need to be involved and engaged when they attend college are well established. Engagement can be the difference between persisting to degree completion and dropping out. Research has sought to identify what makes student involvement more likely. Factors like student-faculty interaction, active and collaborative learning experiences, involvement in extracurricular activities, and residency on campus have all been shown to make a difference.

Stephen Porter doesn’t quarrel with any of these findings, but he points out that research has much less frequently analyzed those institutional structures that affect student engagement. The questions of interest to him are paramount to parents (and other payers of educational costs) and of more than passing interest to faculty: Does the small size with increased potential for faculty contact available at small liberal arts colleges justify the higher tuitions they charge? Does the emphasis on research and graduate education at the big research universities “come at the expense of” undergraduate education? (p. 522) What about those highly selective colleges—is their pursuit of the absolutely best students justified?

Porter looked for answers to these questions via a variety of different statistical models. These models are explained in detail in the article. They do represent some alternative ways of thinking about and analyzing the relevant factors. Using these methods, Porter did find that “institutional structures do affect student engagement in predictable and substantively significant ways.” (p. 550) Here are some specific examples.

The theory of peer effects argues that “by attending college with high quality students, a student’s behavior and academic performance will be higher than if they attended college with lower quality students.” (p. 525) For example, then, students at a highly selective college will spend more time studying because they see how much time fellow students devote to studying. Porter’s findings confirm the validity of this theory. “Student outcomes do differ if a student attends Harvard rather than a school with open admissions, and the difference is due to factors other than differences in resources. Peers exert an effect on college students, and we can see that attending school with high ability students will affect how engaged a student is.” (p. 551)

Interestingly, in previous research, institutional size has been shown not to have much of an effect on student engagement. This finding seems counterintuitive: the more people, the less personal contact and the more difficult for students to get connected. Porter proposes the opposite: that large institutions offer more “settings” where connections between faculty and students can occur. Large schools offer more activities and have more events happening on campus, thereby increasing the chances students have to connect with others. However, in this case the findings were the opposite of what Porter predicted. “More selective, smaller schools with low student-faculty ratios have higher levels of engagement, as well as schools classified as baccalaureate institutions.” (p. 543)

In those universities where faculty do research, it is simply a matter of time. Time spent on research is time not spent connecting with students (particularly undergraduates). Here the finding was predicted, although with an interesting twist. “Doctoral programs have negative effect on student engagement, rather than master’s or first-professional programs….[This] indicates that it is institutional emphasis on research rather than the presence of graduate students that leads to decreased engagement at the undergraduate level.” (p. 552)

Reference: Porter, S. R. (2006). Institutional structures and student engagement. Research in Higher Education, 47 (5), 521–558.

"Student Engagement: A Different Perspective" first appeared in the newsletter The Teaching Professor, a newsletter written for everyone involved with classroom instruction in higher education. If you would like to see more articles like this one, click here for more information and to subscribe.