When the history of American higher education is rewritten years from now, one of the storylines of the first decade of the twenty-first century likely will be the emergence of student engagement as an organizing construct for institutional assessment, accountability, and improvement efforts. The engagement premise is straightforward and easily understood: the more students study a subject, the more they know about it, and the more students practice and get feedback from faculty and staff members on their writing and collaborative problem solving, the deeper they come to understand what they are learning and the more adept they become at managing complexity, tolerating ambiguity, and working with people from different backgrounds or with different views. Engaging in a variety of educationally productive activities also builds the foundation of skills and dispositions people need to live a productive, satisfying life after college. Said another way, engagement helps to develop habits of the mind and heart that enlarge their capacity for continuous learning and personal development. In this chapter, the author briefly summarizes the history of the engagement concept and the circumstances that led to development of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). He then reviews the substance and evolution of NSSE and its impact on institutional researchers. (Contains 3 figures and 3 notes.)