This chapter of the self-study concentrates on those student services for which accreditation criteria have been established by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. With the exception of academic advising, intramural and recreational sports, and new-student orientation, all services listed under section 5.5, Student Development Services, of the SACS Criteria for Accreditation are the responsibility of the Division of Student Affairs, an organization on the campus headed by a vice-chancellor, who reports directly to the provost.
Briefly stated, the mission of the Division of Student Affairs at NCSU is "to facilitate the total educational growth and development of NCSU students to complement the intellectual development facilitated by academic departments and includes personal, social, physical, cultural, spiritual, and leadership development." This mission supports the mission of the University. In particular, the Visual Arts Center, Department of Music and the Thompson and Stewart Theatres have contributed to the University's teaching and service mission by contributing to the cultural life of the greater Raleigh area.
Data supporting the conclusions of this chapter come from responses to surveys distributed in 1992 to undergraduate and graduate students as part of the self-study. The surveys polled 497 graduate students and 580 undergraduate students on seventeen items evaluating student services. Because the majority of the students on campus are undergraduates and the survey results were quite similar for undergraduates and graduates, we comment here primarily on the results of the undergraduate survey.
The majority of student respondents to the self-study surveys said that they were satisfied with the University's student-development services. The Division of Student Affairs serves the student body well, and, with a few exceptions, their services are well received. In what follows, we focus on those few services that are most in need of improvement.
Figure 10.1 shows the percentage of the total pool of undergraduates responding to the self-study survey who chose the negative responses, "dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied," as their answer to the question about each student service. The four services at the top of the graph received negative ratings from approximately twenty percent of the undergraduates. These were food quality, financial aid, food-service locations, and the Technician (the student newspaper).
Figure 10.2 reconfigures the data to discard nonrespondents to individual items and those with no opinion, presenting only responses from those who chose to rate a service. The data in this figure show the percent of undergraduates who rated a service and rated it negatively. Thus, this figure contains ratings from those who were familiar with the service and had an opinion about it. Using this metric, there were six services with which more than 20 percent of the undergraduates were dissatisfied: the African-American Cultural Center, quality of the food, financial aid, food-service locations, student government, and the Technician. The two services that are present in this figure but not in the previous one are the African-American Cultural Center and student government. Care must be taken in interpreting these results because the vast majority of students had no opinion on the quality of these servicesof the 580 students completing the survey only 165 expressed any opinion about student government and only 112 had any opinion about the African-American Cultural Center. This implies that the services, while perceived negatively by those few who rated them, may have very little impact on the student body.
Figure 10.3 shows the percentage of graduate students rating the service who were negative ("dissatisfied" and "very dissatisfied"). The graduate students tended to be more critical than the undergraduates, but indicated roughly the same likes and dislikes as the undergraduates.
The responses to the self-study survey form an integral part of the evaluations of the student services discussed below.
