David Eubanks named to U.S. Department of Education committee

January 24, 2020

David Eubanks, assistant vice president of Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness at Furman University, has been appointed to the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) of the U.S. Department of Education. He will serve a five-year term on the committee, which advises the secretary of education on establishing and enforcing standards of university accrediting agencies or associations.

Eubanks is a noted expert on measuring the effectiveness of a college education. In a July 2019 column for Inside Higher Ed, Eubanks wrote that universities should “understand how students succeed: their hopes when they attend college, the effect of their history on chances for success, what causes them to choose a major, how the individual traits of students can lead to individualized pathways, what course grades and course evaluations mean and how to improve them, and so on.”

His office collaborates with others on campus to inform and improve The Furman Advantage by collecting and analyzing evidence. Recent work includes understanding student persistence, a longitudinal study of student writing and the relationships between socioeconomics and graduation.

“Demonstrating value for tuition dollars continues to be an important issue nationally,” Eubanks said. “I hope my experience in researching student outcomes will be useful to the work that NACIQI has before it.”