Thirty-four CIC member colleges and universities have signed up as participants in the CIC/Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Consortium, supported by a new $50,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York that complements a previous grant from the Teagle Foundation. This project will enable participating colleges and universities to test the effectiveness of CLA as an indicator of the “value added” to students’ learning in their college years.
      Representatives of the institutions will gather once a year to share the results of their testing and to develop continuous improvement strategies that build on their understanding of the CLA results. The 2005 meeting will take place July 18–19 in Washington, DC.
      The CLA will provide tools that individual institutions can use for institutional improvement, and it will help to make the collective case for the effectiveness of independent colleges and universities. It may be particularly useful for institutions developing fundraising campaigns, institutional self-studies, or integrated marketing strategies.
      For more information on the CIC/CLA Consortium, contact Hal Hartley, CIC director of research, at (202) 466-7230 or hhartley@cic.nche.edu.