View AASCU members

Voluntary System of Accountability

The Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) communicates information on the undergraduate student experience through a common web reporting template, the College Portrait. The VSA is a voluntary initiative for 4-year public colleges and universities. Developed through a partnership between the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), the VSA is designed to help institutions meet the following objectives:

  • Demonstrate accountability and stewardship to public
  • Measure educational outcomes to identify effective educational practices
  • Assemble information that is accessible, understandable, and comparable
  • Sign-up here


Presidential Advisory Committee Update

Six of the seven task forces working on the VSA project have met to date. The seventh, the System Design and Information Task Force, will not meet until the work of other task forces is nearing completion. Below are updates on the progress of each VSA groups.

Presidential Advisory Committee The committee has met by phone to organize its work and to provide guidance to the task forces and work groups. As the committees finalize their recommendations the advisory committee will provide more specific feedback and instruction to the groups.

Time Schedule The VSA development process is on schedule. The task forces and work groups will complete their work in mid to late July. The system design and information task force will begin to meet during this period to consider broad system design, implementation, and maintenance issues. Staff assembled the recommendations for consideration by the presidential advisory committee in early August. After modifications requested by the presidential advisory committee are addressed, feedback on the specific elements proposed to constitute VSA will be sought from AASCU and NASULGC members.



System Design and Information Task Force
The System Design and Information Task Force is charged to explore overall questions about the Voluntary System of Accountability.



Student and Family Information Task Force
This task force, led by Chancellor Loren Crabtree, has decided on a reporting template and is developing the specific reporting elements it will contain. Their work has been informed by a number of focus groups empanelled by ACE to determine what information families and students looked for when searching a college. The focus groups were made up of families and students from a range of geographic locations and income levels as well as diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. After deciding on the data elements and their presentation in the template, the task force will conduct additional focus groups to test whether their product satisfies students and families. The group is also exploring whether a simple net tuition calculator on each institution’s website might help low income students estimate what their cost of attendance would be. This group is exploring whether data from the National Student Clearinghouse could provide a cost-effective means of tracking the large proportion of students who transfer into and out of our universities. Using this additional data, each VSA participant could report student success data that is more meaningful than the federally defined graduation rate. Finally, the taskforce is considering whether uniform surveys of graduates and alumni one to five years after graduation will provide useful information to prospective students.



Core Educational Outcomes Task Force
The core educational outcomes task force, chaired by President Dan Fogel, and the associated work groups chaired by Presidents Jolene Koster and F. King Alexander, have decided on a preliminary set of learning outcomes tests that, at a minimum, measure critical thinking, analytic reasoning and written communication, and that also can be used in a value added format. Those tests are: C-Base, CLA, CAAP, MAPP, GRE and ACT WorkKeys. An extensive set of common questions has been sent to each of the test developers; the responses will be used to winnow the tests down to a final set of tests. The groups are also working on the complex issues of sample selection and student motivation that must be resolved properly if the tests are to produce valid results. A number of educational outcomes that reflect student growth in other areas such as leadership have been assembled and efforts are underway to identify reliable methods to measure such growth. This effort is more tentative than the learning outcomes measurement effort because the area is less developed. Accordingly, measurement of student growth will not be a required part of VSA for participating universities.



Campus Engagement Task Force
This task force, led by Chancellor Richard Wells, is working to conceptualize the student engagement/involvement activities that are related to student learning outcomes. Their next task is to map the constructs onto potential measurement instruments, NSSE, the CIRP surveys (Freshman Survey, YFCY, and CSS) and CSEQ in order to understand whether each measures the constructs adequately They will use this mapping exercise to identify which instruments will be made available to VSA campuses and which questions on those tests should become part of the public VSA report.