You Are Here:
Orienting Yourself in Student Satisfaction
Have you stood in front of the way-finding map at an airport or mall and taken comfort when you located that “You are here” indicator? Ah good; there I am. And importantly, there I am within the context of everything else. Where should I go next?
Leading beyond legacy
Founded in 1891 in Quincy, Illinois, Blessing-Rieman was among the first accredited nursing schools in the nation. Despite its impressive heritage, Blessing-Rieman does not rely on legacy to carry it forward. Campus leaders carefully track their students’ success and can confidently prove that, year after year, they consistently outperform fellow test-takers on pass rates on state and national licensure exams and find relevant employment. But are the students happy before that stage? Where would we find them on the mall map of student satisfaction?
Listening to lead
Blessing-Rieman knows its nurses and healthcare professionals are comfortable in the world of analysis and metrics and exacting in their expectations of themselves and others. With this in mind, Blessing-Rieman College of Nursing and Health Sciences began administering RNL’s Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI) in 2010. In 2018 they added RNL’s Priorities Survey for Online Learners (PSOL). According to Andrew Griesbaum, Blessing-Rieman’s student and alumni services officer, their goal was to understand how satisfied students are.
“When you boil it down, students are our customers—and if you’re not listening to your customers, then what are you doing?”
Griesbaum also shared that they use the data internally for several specific purposes:
- To promote the areas in which Blessing-Rieman excels.
- To close the loop between the types of services students want but may not be aware the college offers by proactively promoting their availability and contact information.
- To focus the attention of developmental committees on the measures where the data show Blessing-Rieman students are less satisfied than they were in previous years or less satisfied than the external national comparison benchmarks.
- To highlight the topics upon which administrators should reach out to students to facilitate greater communication and exchange.
Blessing-Rieman administers the inventories on a biannual cycle and has the benefit of benchmarking their results against RNL’s national database of other institutions’ metrics along with their own year-over-year comparisons.
Are you ready to listen to your students to lead your institution to success?
Learn more about the RNL Satisfaction-Priorities Surveys, or reach out for a complimentary consultation with our student assessment experts.