HEDS Alumni Surveys
The HEDS Alumni Surveys, available in undergraduate and advanced degree versions, ask alumni about the quality and impact of their educational experiences, including cocurricular activities such as internships, study abroad, and community service. The surveys also ask alumni to evaluate the impact of their education on their postgraduate critical thinking, problem-solving, and other learning outcomes. Finally, they ask about postgraduate employment, college satisfaction, and college debt.
The HEDS Alumni Surveys ask alumni to report on five dimensions of their experience:
- Good Teaching and High-Quality Interactions with Faculty
- Challenging Assignments and High Faculty Expectations
- Interactions with Diversity
- Growth on Intellectual Outcomes
- Growth on Civic Outcomes
Undergraduate Version
Beginning in 2023, we added a section on leadership to the undergraduate survey. This section measures two dimensions of leadership—leadership aspirations and leadership motivations. All participating institutions will receive summary data on this new section in their report. For full details on the scales and purpose of these two measures, please visit the HEDS Research Projects page.
Advanced Degree Version
Advanced degree alumni include graduates from master’s and doctoral programs, professional programs such as dentistry and medicine, and advanced degree certificate programs.
Timing Recommendation
We recommend that you administer this survey to alumni 1, 5, and/or 10 years after graduation. The 1-year-out cohort includes alumni who graduated in 2022 and 2023. The 5-year-out cohort includes alumni who graduated in 2018 and 2019 and the 10-year-out cohort includes alumni who graduated in 2013 and 2014. You may also administer the survey to alumni who graduated at other times.
Click on the following questions to learn more.
You can administer the HEDS Alumni Survey for any 3−6 week period between September 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024. The latest possible date to begin administering the HEDS Alumni Survey is June 9, 2024, and we ask that you register at least four weeks prior to the date on which you plan to begin administering the survey.
All participating institutions will receive the following for each version of the survey they administer:
- A Real-time report – an online report which will give a real-time summary of responses to some of the closed-ended survey questions.
- SPSS and Microsoft Excel files with your institution’s survey data. We typically send these files within two weeks of your survey closing.
- A report that compares the responses of your alumni to those of all other participating institutions’ alumni on all survey questions and indicators. You can expect this report approximately three months after the last survey closes.
YES! Here’s how:
- We insert your institution’s name at the top of each page of the survey
- You can add supplemental questions at the end of the survey
- You can customize the survey invitations and reminders
The base cost of the survey is $575 for institutions in HEDS and $2,300 for institutions not in HEDS. There are some custom options for additional fees. Institutions that administer to multiple degree populations will receive a discount on the second survey. You can find an information sheet with full details in the downloads section of this page.
To learn more about becoming a HEDS member, please visit our Join HEDS page.
Michael Thompson, Illinois Wesleyan University
“The HEDS Alumni Survey is unique because it gets into academic data and not just employment outcomes. We like that it touches on satisfaction, student-faculty interaction, and mission and value issues.”
Diane Saphire, Trinity University
“We liked the question that asks how different experiences contributed to alumni’s learning and personal development. We ended up using data from that question in a recent strategic plan, which calls for a new center focused on study abroad and international experiences in response, in part, to how high those experiences were rated.”
Susan Warner Taylor, Baldwin Wallace University
“We use the HEDS Alumni Survey for academic assessment, as it provides evidence for our university learning outcomes. We like being able to align survey items with our outcomes, then filter the results by major and share them at the program level.”
Jon Christy and Nan Hibbs, Luther College
“We like that we were able to analyze the HEDS Alumni Survey data by college major. By doing so, academic departments could see where they were in comparison to the college as a whole.”
Charles Clark, Knox College
“The questions about how their undergraduate experience at Knox impacts their personal development and knowledge are very important and useful to us.”
If you have any questions, please email us at AlumniSurvey@hedsconsortium.org, and we will get back to you right away.
Downloads