A question we often hear form our clients at the early stages of a research project is about their expected response rate.  What response rate should we get?  Is it enough?  Is it better or worse than others?  Should we give away a prize to insure a higher response rate?

Response rate is important.  It tells us a lot about the target population’s attitude regarding the survey and their belief in our willingness to listen and take action.  Response rate, however, is not as important as the number of responses.  (more…)

High value topic points, as opposed to talking points, come from a different question construct although they also play a role in the definition of equity-of-degree. Here we rely on questions about what is important to alumni about their student and alumni experience and where there are the greatest differences between importance and effectiveness. We ask student-related questions not to try and change the memory of that experience or even to use it as a primary source to influence current activities on campus. Rather, we are looking for the topic areas that are most related to value-of-degree for alumni and where they most want to hear about how things are better or different than when they were students. (more…)

Alumni want to know that the value of their degree is higher today than it was when they got the degree and that the university is doing things that will cause that value to be even higher in the future. The definition for value will vary from institution to institution but this theme is very consistent for all of the 135 universities and colleges for which we have data.

For example, at some schools value is about school rank, while at others it is more focused on relationships with faculty or accomplishments of students, and for others it is about campus aesthetics (physical plant).   (more…)

We recently completed a project with a client whose staff and board asked some great questions about reliability and usefulness of the data from their AAS project.  In addition to specific answers to their questions we composed the discussion below.  We thought it might be interesting to others and so have reproduced it here. (more…)

Launching a successful alumni attitudinal survey can be an intimidating proposition.  One of the things we (The Alumni Attitude Study) do at the beginning of each project is work with our clients to establish and maintain some key principles top-of-mind throughout the entire survey process.  (more…)