Senior Survey data gathering
Collection of information about career path destinations and outcomes grows as does response rates. Although the Senior Survey officially closed on June 30, Student Affairs Assessment and Strategic Initiatives (SAASI) and partners within each school continue to reach out to recent graduates. Rather than focusing on a high survey response, focuse was placed on a high “knowledge” response, since knowledge can come from a variety of sources and can be more effective to manage than repeated requests to answer a survey.
Working with colleagues who are more closely connected through fewer degrees of separation to a graduate (e.g. advisors, residential life staff, faculty) than a scripted survey allowed us to reach our goal of surpassing last year’s high 72 percent response rate. We also expanded the response rate competition to include the residential communities and certain programs such as EOP. This year the College of Community and Public Affairs had 100 percent response rate, followed closely by the Decker School of Nursing, the School of Management and the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science. Harpur College of Arts and Sciences increased its response rate 67 percent to 75 percent, which helped the overall response rate increase to 82 percent.
SAASI continues to gather information for those students who, by June 30, 2014, had not found employment or were not enrolled in another program. The report on this information will be made available in November 2014, once all of the data is compiled and analyzed. SAASI works with each school and the Fleishman Center for Career and Professional Development to make sure that the information is presented in formats that are useful. This past summer an undergraduate student was hired who developed an interactive data visualization of the 2013 information that will be shown to each school for feedback to help determine how best to present this information in the future.
Preliminary analysis of the at-time-of-graduation data shows that our career outcome rate (aka placement rate) for both those seeking employment or continuing their education has increased.