HEDS Diversity and Equity Campus Climate Survey
The HEDS Diversity and Equity Campus Climate Survey asks students, faculty, staff, and administrators about their:
- perceptions of their institution’s climate,
- perceptions of how their institution supports diversity and equity, and
- experiences with discrimination and harassment at their institution.
Institutions can use information from this survey to develop a better understanding of the extent to which their campus climate supports diversity and equity, and to inform and improve support, policies, and practices at their institution related to diversity and equity, including those to prevent or respond to discrimination and harassment.
The survey is designed to be administered to everyone in the campus community – faculty, staff, administrators, and students. The survey usually takes around 15 minutes to complete, and participants’ responses are anonymous.
Registration Deadline
We require that you register at least seven weeks (35 business days) before the day you want your survey to start. With the high demand for our surveys, this timeline ensures we can do a good job of administering your survey for you. We urge you to download and read the survey information sheet by clicking on the “Survey Options, Policies, and Fees (PDF)” button found in the Downloads section of this webpage. This document details all the survey options available to you, as well as our expectations, practices, fees, and terms of service.
Click on the following questions to learn more.
You can administer the HEDS Diversity and Equity Campus Climate Survey for any 3–6 week period between October 7, 2024, and May 30, 2025.
Please be aware that you must register at least seven weeks (35 business days) prior to the date on which you plan to begin administering the survey. The last day to register for a 2024-2025 administration is March 21, 2025.
Live updates:
- We provide ongoing updates while your survey is open to give you a first look at select, high-level data from the survey. These updates will give you an early, overall sense of how people responded to parts of the survey, and they allow you to gauge your response rates so you can adjust your communication strategies if necessary.
Unit-record survey data:
- You will receive your institution’s unit-record survey data in both SPSS and Microsoft Excel files.
- The open-ended survey responses will be shared in a separate file.
- To protect the anonymity of your respondents, we remove all personally identifying information from your data files and review the open-ended responses thoroughly before sending them to you.
- Given the sensitive nature of the data from these surveys, your institution must accept our secure data handling agreements as outlined in the registration form and the survey’s information sheet in order to receive a data file. We also encourage you to work with your institutional review board (IRB) to help assure your campus constituencies that your institution is treating the survey data and findings appropriately.
Comparative report:
- This report compares the responses of your students and employees to the students and employees of all other participating institutions on all survey questions and indicators.
- As this report includes comparisons to other participating institutions, we cannot begin working on them until the survey window closes on May 30, 2025. We will send this report in late summer 2025.
- We are happy to share a sample of this report. Please reach out to us if you are interested.
YES! Here’s how:
- We insert your institution’s name at the top of each page of the survey and in the text of applicable questions
- You can customize the survey invitations and reminders
- You can add custom, institution-specific questions at the end of the survey
While you can add supplemental questions to the end, we do not modify our survey questions or response options. In order for us to offer the benefit of comparative data between participating institutions in our survey reports, the questions and response options have to be the same across all the colleges and universities using the survey.
- Survey base cost – $2,300
- Survey base cost for HEDS members – $575
There are some custom options for additional fees. You will find all survey options and fees in the survey information sheet. Please click on the “Survey Options, Policies, and Fees (PDF)” button in the Downloads section of this webpage.
To learn more about your institution becoming a HEDS member, please visit our Join HEDS page.
If you have any questions, please email us at diversityequitysurvey@hedsconsortium.org.
Downloads