HEDS Graduating Student Survey
The HEDS Graduating Student Survey asks your graduating students to:
- evaluate the teaching practices and institutional conditions they experienced as undergraduates,
- assess the impact of their experiences on their intellectual growth and how well it prepared them for success after college, and
- describe their plans after graduation.
This survey is based on our long-running HEDS Senior Survey and is intended for students graduating from 2-year and 4-year undergraduate programs. It is part of our suite of surveys focused on understanding and supporting student success–a core part of the HEDS mission. Our other student success surveys include the New Student, Returning Student, and Student Satisfaction surveys.
Registration Deadline
You must 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 new 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 Graduating Student Survey for a 3–6-week period between March 24 and June 27, 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.
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 your students are responding 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 a preliminary version of your institution’s unit-record survey data in both SPSS and Microsoft Excel files within ten days of your survey closing. You will receive final data files that will include any HEDS calculated variables and/or indicators with your final survey report.
Comparative report:
- A report that compares your graduating students to graduating students at all other participating institutions on all survey questions and indicators.
- We cannot begin developing this report until the survey closes at the end of June. Please note, that we have several surveys that close before this and will be working on multiple reports.
YES! Here’s how:
- We insert your institution’s name at the top of each page of the survey
- You can customize the survey invitations and reminders
- You can add up to 10 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 – $1,325
- Survey base cost for HEDS members – $0
If you have any questions, please email us at GraduatingSurvey@hedsconsortium.org, and we will get back to you right away.
Downloads