About Us
The University of California, Irvine, since Fall 2019, has worked to develop and implement a state-of-the-art measurement project to improve our understanding of the value of undergraduate educational experiences and promote evidence-based models of undergraduate student success. The measurement project at UCI has worked to demonstrate the feasibility and utility of collecting, analyzing, and sharing innovative forms of data that present researchers and stakeholders with new opportunities to delve deeper into improving institutional performance and advancing educational equity.
The project, originally supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and now under the auspices of the university, aims to document the value of the undergraduate experience and improve undergraduate student outcomes. The project includes three measurement strands: (1) administrative data; (2) learning management system data; and (3) performance assessments and survey data. For a detailed strand description read here. The project draws on expertise from the diverse disciplinary backgrounds of its team members.
The UCI Measuring Undergraduate Success Trajectories project (UCI-MUST), also known as the Next Generation Undergraduate Success Measurement Project, began tracking its first cohort in Fall 2019. Data on everything from transcripts to online classroom behavior, living situations to student moods has been collected. Since then the project has welcomed a new cohort of students in Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, and more recently Fall 2023.
We have engaged with a broad set of external and internal partners to accomplish our ambitious goals and achieve national and international visibility for this project. External partners include: the Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Value Commission, which commissioned and publicized a report that promotes a holistic framework to identify the value of college education for diverse students; the John Gardner Institute, which has collaborated with us and is eager to explore ways to apply our measurement system to the institutional improvement work they are doing with 400 broad access colleges and universities; professional associations (such as the Social Science Research Council, the Reinvention Collaborative, the Center for Studies of Higher Education), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and national media outlets (including PBS Newshour, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and InsideHigherEd), which have allowed us to promote our work widely.