Staff members drafted a survey instrument and conducted cognitive interviews with institutional researchers at a variety of colleges to assess the feasibility of questions on a wide range of topics. ![]() Additionally, some respondents noted that the HI’s conceptualization of the humanities, particularly its exclusion of the fine and performing arts from the field, could be counter-intuitive for community college administrators and might affect their willingness or ability to respond to the survey.Ī meeting with community college leaders and researchers in December 2015 led to the HI’s commitment to developing a national survey tailored to the community college sector. One was that differences in terminology and institutional structure between two-year and four-year institutions made it difficult to ask questions that would provide comparability between a study of community colleges and the surveys of four-year institutions already conducted by the HI. The results of this study were encouraging (demonstrating considerable interest among these institutions’ leaders in knowing more about the state of the humanities at community colleges), but they also revealed two challenges. Meanwhile, the Academy continued to work with the Community College Humanities Association to develop a survey of the community college sector.Īfter a 2012 meeting with leaders in this sector, as well as conversation with staff members at the American Association of Community Colleges, the HI in 2014 conducted an exploratory survey of 25 presidents of community colleges. 1 Given that difficulty, the American Academy chose to focus its first forays into survey research on humanities departments at four-year institutions (in 2008 and again in 2013).Given that the nation’s almost 1,000 public community colleges enroll approximately a third of the nation’s undergraduates, 2Īnd serve a disproportionate share of non-traditional, low-income, part-time students, the Indicators staff recognized the need to include this sector in future studies. Working with the heads of scholarly societies in the field, project leaders sought to develop a survey to address these knowledge gaps, but they quickly ran up against a critical structural difference between two- and four-year institutions: while humanities education at four-year colleges and universities is typically organized into discipline-focused departments that could serve as the subjects of research, this is not the case at most community colleges. As the HI developed in the early 2000s, however, project leaders confronted a lack of national data on key higher education topics. In the original conception of the HI, the American Academy did not envision collecting new data, planning instead to draw exclusively on existing high-quality data sources. (Download the Full Report) Background & Development The representation among humanities coursetakers of “dually enrolled” students, that is, students who earn college credit in the humanities while still in high school. ![]() ![]()
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