Fueled by calls for more educational accountability from accreditation agencies, industry, legislators, the general public, and students, the past decade has seen the rise of an enduring assessment movement targeted at colleges and universities across the country. Much of the attention has focused on the undergraduate level, but the spotlight increasingly has been placed on graduate and professional education. Diminishing financial resources, an uncertain environment, and public doubts about the capacity of universities to educate professionals for a rapidly changing workplace are all leading to much closer scrutiny of graduate and professional programs.
In response to myriad pressures-including mandates from state governments, accrediting agencies, and institutional governing boards to maintain program quality and preserve limited resources-a number of universities have taken steps to assess their graduate and professional programs. Our own institution, for example, is currently developing an outcomes assessment model for implementation in graduate departments across campus. Anchored in the widely shared assumption that program outcomes are perhaps the most important consideration in evaluating and strengthening programs, a growing number of institutions are placing attention on the outcomes of graduate and professional programs, especially outcomes associated with student achievement. The animating intent of this chapter is to help inform such efforts.
Not least because of the highly visible emphasis on undergraduate education for most of the past decade, graduate and professional education has received relatively little attention in the assessment literature. This lacuna may also be accounted for in two other ways. For one, there is the long-held belief that graduate education-and professional education in particular-is in large NEW DIRECTIONS FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH, no. 92.