ABSTRACT
It is unlikely that Harvard had considered formal “outcomes assessment” for its first class of nine students in 1640, and nowhere is it recorded that this oldest U.S. institution of higher education ever offered a public relations curriculum. However, for many of today's nearly 4,200 degree-granting institutions in the United States—with their nearly 16 million students (Snyder, Tan, & Hoffman, 2004)—formalized “out-comes assessment” has become an overriding concern. Moreover, hundreds of educators at scores of these institutions continue to deliberate how to assess educational “outcomes” to evaluate their students who are studying public relations.
