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 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, Student Satisfaction, and Pre-Advising surveys.
NEW: Survey Your Winter Graduates
You can now survey students who are graduating mid-year at no additional cost by opening your survey in the winter. If you do so, your reports and data files will include responses from students who graduated in both the winter and spring. See below for more information.
Click on the following questions to learn more.
There are two administration windows depending on whether you are surveying students graduating in the winter or spring. You may survey both sets of graduates at no extra cost. If you do this, it will be one survey with a split administration window, with the first half of your administration happening during the winter window and the second half during the spring window.
You may survey your graduating students in any 3–6 week period during one or both of these administration windows:
Winter Graduates
- Survey between November 2, 2026, and your institution’s winter graduation date. This administration window is only for students who will graduate mid-academic year.
Spring Graduates
- Survey between March 22, 2027, and June 25, 2027.
*Please be aware that you must register at least seven weeks (35 business days) prior to the earliest date on which you plan to begin administering the survey.
Live updates:
- We provide ongoing updates while your survey is open, giving you a first look at select high-level data. These updates will give you an early, overall sense of how people responded to parts of the survey, allow you to gauge your response rates so you can adjust your communication strategies if necessary, and provide an immediate summary of results as soon as the survey closes.
Unit-record survey data:
- You will receive your institution’s unit-record survey data in both SPSS and Microsoft Excel files within ten days of your survey closing.
- If you are doing a split winter/spring administration, you will receive your data files after the spring survey period ends.
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. We anticipate delivering these reports in the Fall 2028 semester.
YES! Here’s how:
- We insert your institution’s name at the top of each page of the survey
- We personalize the survey invitations and reminders with your institution’s name, and they are signed by people from your institution.
- 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 – $1,525
- 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.
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