School of Behavioral and Applied Sciences

Laurie Schreiner, Ph.D., directs the doctoral programs in Higher Education. Her 25 years of experience in higher education as a faculty member, associate academic dean, and research fellow provide a strong experiential foundation for her teaching. Her primary interests include student satisfaction and retention, strengths-based education, Christian higher education, campus climate and sense of community, and the programming needs of first-year students and sophomores. She is co-author of the Student Satisfaction Inventory, a nationally normed instrument used on more than 1,600 college and university campuses across the United States and Canada. She was also a project director on two federal grants from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) through the U.S. Department of Education; the first focused on successful programming for first-year college students and the second grant focused on the development of a campus-wide four-year strengths education program to increase student retention and success. Currently she is a senior research associate for the Gallup Organization and has completed the national validity study of StrengthsFinder with college students, along with the second edition of the book StrengthsQuest: Discover and Develop Your Strengths in Academics, Career, and Beyond. She is a Senior Fellow at the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities and directs a national project on student retention and satisfaction, the Comprehensive Assessment Project, which involves 70 Christian colleges and universities annually.