The Higher Education Practice, LLC

As colleges and universities come to rely more and more on evidence to assess their performance while simultaneously coming under greater scrutiny from external agencies, the role that commercial surveys may play in self-study, strategic planning, and continuous improvement should be highlighted.  They offer a wealth of information directly related to these processes and provide potentially powerful tools for understanding outcomes, e.g., retention, that are central to an institution’s mission.

The Higher Education Practice (HEP) is prepared to assist you in designing and implementing research programs using commercial surveys to complement your other research for self-study, strategic planning, and continuous improvement – with which we are also prepared to assist you.  But here we would like to focus on the assistance we can provide you in the use of commercial surveys.  This assistance ranges from working collaboratively with you to identify commercial surveys that may meet your needs, developing sampling designs to ensure representative results, analyzing results for your assessment/planning teams to interpret collaboratively in the context of their goals, and linking the results of surveys to institutional data for further analysis – particularly analyses designed for determining the predictors of retention or assessing achievement of your school’s goals.

HEP recognizes that hundreds of institutions utilize commercial surveys but usually to a very limited degree that often does not capitalize on the multiple benefits of them.  For example, hundreds of independent colleges and universities administer the Higher Education Research Institute’s (HERI) Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) survey to their incoming students.  But typically only aggregate results are reviewed in the context of results for comparison groups of schools leading to little institutional action based upon the results.  In contrast there is ample evidence in the literature that, if students’ CIRP responses are linked to your institution’s data about them, you could devise an early intervention program to improve retention.  In other words, you could act on the results of the CIRP rather than simply be informed by them.

HEP is prepared to help you in this regard.  We “bring to the table” sophisticated research skills as well as a deep understanding of how independent colleges work – from admissions to the registrar’s office to student affairs to financial aid to …  And so, we have the ability to do sophisticated research that is directly tied to actions you can take to improve your performance – not just research for the sake of research.

Here are some of the benefits of using commercial surveys:^[1]

1. They have been developed by professionals and have been tested over time
2. Have been used by hundreds of institutions
3. Provide access to comparative data on institutions similar to yours
4. Provide an opportunity to link survey results to institutional data as well as to other surveys administered to the same students later in their careers at your school.
5. Provide data that are directly related to your school’s self-study needs for reaccreditation, strategic planning, and continuous improvement.
6. Most importantly, if linked to institutional data and analyzed appropriately, provide information upon which you can act to improve performance.

The latter is the least understood and where HEP’s expertise can play a significant role in your use of these surveys. 

The following is a list of commercial surveys that colleges often use.  As you will see, they cover many of the areas colleges address in their self-studies, strategic planning and continuous improvement initiatives.