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Category: Students

Applicant Surveys We’d Like to See

I’ve always been a bit intrigued by the continuing popularity of Applicant Surveys. What is it that people expect to see in this year’s results that weren’t there last year? There are basically three sets of research questions that are at the heart of current applicant surveys: who is applying (i.e., the social/ethnic composition), what information tools are students using to acquire information about institutions, and what do students say they are looking for in an institution? The “who applies”

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January 17, 2012 1 Comment

No More Boring Surveys

As most of you probably know, we at HESA spend a lot of our time working on surveys. While doing so, we see a lot of different types of survey instruments, especially from governments and institutions. And we’ve come to a major conclusion: Most of them are really boring. There was a time – say fifteen years ago– when doing surveys of applicants, graduates and alumni was relatively rare. There weren’t any surveys of satisfaction, or engagement, or anything else,

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January 16, 2012 No Comments

Miserable Toronto Students: Cutting to the Chase

Loyal readers will know we’ve been studying why Toronto students are so miserable for some time now. But we think we’ve found the jackpot here. Up until now, we’ve mostly been looking at common institutional factors that seem to result in lower satisfaction levels. But it’s time to take a really good look at Toronto students themselves. Could it be that they’re just more demanding/prone to complain/ likely to kvetch? In a word, are they just more crotchety than students

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December 9, 2011 3 Comments

Grades, Satisfaction and Miserable Toronto Students

It’s been noted many times (here, for instance) that professors who give easy As tend to do better on course evaluations than those who don’t. But does this work at the institutional level as well? It’s hard to tell directly because all institutions essentially grade on the same curve. But we can get at it indirectly by looking at the gap between high school and university grades, which does vary significantly – at more selective institutions, students see a drop;

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November 25, 2011 No Comments

Beyond Co-op (Part Two)

Yesterday, I wrote about the results of our study on work-integrated learning, where we reported on the results of a survey asking students to tell us how much they thought their various jobs helped them in terms of reinforcing concepts learned in class, obtaining workplace skills and career preparation. In particular, I emphasized that while co-op programs came more or less top of the pack on these measures, two other types of employment were found capable of delivering very similar

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November 24, 2011 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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