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Tag: Student Surveys

Looking Like You Care About Undergraduates

In our annual Globe Survey, we ask students to describe, using an 11-point scale, the extent to which their school is geared towards serving graduate students or undergraduates. As you’d expect, undergraduates tend to be slightly more satisfied (y-axis) with their schools the more undergraduate they perceive it to be. It’s not a huge effect, and it’s presumably correlated to some degree with size, but it’s there. Figure 1: Satisfaction as a Function of Perceived Grad-centricness What’s really interesting, though,

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February 24, 2012 No Comments

Best and Worst Student Experiences

Most of you know that we at HESA do the data collection and analysis for the Globe and Mail’s Canadian University Report. But what we do with that data is much more than just gives scores to each institution. We also spend a lot of our time mining that data for all its worth, looking for insight into the student experience (and not just on those miserable Toronto students). Today we’d like to look at how students describe their best

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February 22, 2012 1 Comment

Graduate Surveys We’d Like to See

If there’s one type of Canadian educational survey where complete and utter stasis has set in, it’s graduate surveys. Questions like “are you employed,” “what are your earnings,” and “were you satisfied with your education” aren’t just boring, I think they’re actively making us stupider. There seems to be a general view that because the answers to these questions don’t change very much from year to year, that we’re doing as good a job as we ever have. But labour

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January 20, 2012 2 Comments

Student Surveys We’d Like to See

Surveys of current students tend to focus on just a few areas. Apart from questions about demographics and time use, they ask a lot of specific questions about satisfaction with student services along with a few general questions about overall satisfaction. This is odd, because at the end of the day students don’t actually think student services are central to the overall quality of their PSE experience. What they care about first and foremost is the quality of the teaching

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January 18, 2012 No Comments

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

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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