Administrators are considering ending a survey that touches on social and academic engagement in regards to everything from housing to internships.
Current seniors and freshmen received an email February 22nd inviting them to take the National Survey of Student Engagement, which aims to measure how well undergraduates are engaged socially and academically at the New School. Despite advertising efforts, organizers say they are nowhere near their response goal so far.
“The [responses] are not rolling in as expected,” Tet Lopez-Rabson, one of the organizers said.
The survey started in 2000, and was created by Center for Survey research at Indiana University, the university implemented it in 2001. It occurs every three years, so current seniors may remember taking this survey as freshmen. The office of institutional Research and Effectiveness hasn’t historically been able to reach their ideal response rate. In 2013 only 19.8 percent of students responded. This year, they hope to double that number. Lopez-Rabson and Dr. Paula Maas, the other organizer, say their current goal is to have about 1,264 freshman and 1,174 seniors respond to the survey. If they’re goal is reached it will allow each department to sift thoroughly though data regarding internships (seeing if seniors have progressively had more),seeing how many students are living on campus, or looking more profoundly into the international community.
The questions in the survey pertain to engagement in the classroom and campus community. (ie: Do you reach out to teachers outside of the classroom for help?)
“The survey] accounts for student experience. It’s the heart of it,” Lopez-Rabson said. As their ideal deadline soon approaches – the end of March – with the survey remaining open until June 1 – the question is really whether the student body is as engaged as we hope it is.
Though the survey aims to measure engagement,the numbers show that not many students are in engaging in the survey itself.
“It’s ironic isn’t it?” Maas said.
Lopez-Rabson-who is currently heading the advertising campaign for the survey hopes that exposing it to the student body will lead to an increase in responses. Some institutions choose to add incentive to have their students to participate in surveys like this. But securing more funds could be difficult, Maas said.
“I don’t think anyone has a problem with paying a few thousand dollars for students to participate in a survey that is so important, but if you start adding a lot more incentive that would be another discussion, ” Maas said.
As the organizers wait for the numbers to begin rolling in there has been discussion, at least between the two of them, of how far they are willing to go to get these surveys back in the amounts that they need, which is about 2,438.
“We may find out this year even with a really good advertising campaign, we still might not be getting a good number of responses,” Maas said.
If organizers don’t get their desired response they they may need to consider discontinuing the survey.
“Maybe Nessie isn’t the right choice for us as an institution, and we may need to go to more qualitative research to get at what we need,”Mass said. “The downside of that is that we won’t have a national comparison.”
The survey can be taken here, or you can check your inbox.