The multiple benefits of surveying your graduates

School Administrator, August, 2004 by Frank P. McNamara

Schools are under great public pressure to improve student performance and report to the public.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools need ways to get timely, useful and important postgraduation information for planning and reporting purposes.

Tracking high school graduates can be a time-consuming and frustrating job, especially when it takes place years after their graduation. Sometimes school leaders need outside help. They can contract with a professional firm that builds contact data before students leave high school and keeps it updated on an annual basis. Some firms specialize in surveys in the secondary school market.

School leaders can make good use of information gathered annually through surveys.

Customized Help

The survey firm's experts can help you design the questionnaire to your specification. Questions can address any number of subjects, including assessments about the quality of the schooling your graduates experienced and their post-graduate pursuits.

You may want to know about specific school programs or how recent graduates feel about the school atmosphere. You might want to ask the school's alumni at various stages following graduation how well high school prepared them for post-secondary study or the workforce. You might be able to solicit candid views on school safety or whether they felt challenged by their classes.

The point is, you can customize your approach to learn whatever your leadership thinks might be important to know about the time students spend in school.

With a good student contact base, schools can start with a senior year survey of specific subject areas and measure progress in subsequent years as program improvements are implemented. Schools also should plan to check in regularly for several years after graduation to obtain more detail about the preparation provided by the school. Think of it as an opportunity for a senior exit survey, an initial graduate survey (perhaps six months to a year after graduation) and an advanced graduate survey (annually), as well as multiple opportunities over the years for public relations letters to alumni of the school and district.

To be effective, a service has to be initiated in the senior year. If student contact information isn't captured then, it won't be available or easily recoverable later. A plan must be in place for regular contact following graduation, though not so often that it will be viewed as a burden to the student or the student's family, but often enough to keep information up-to-date.

Efficient Handling

Schools will be able to mine a wealth of responses to inform their program planning and to answer questions about the relevancy of curriculum, the adequacy of offerings, the style of delivery and the effectiveness of instruction. Positive and negative findings both have a role in follow-up activities.

A survey of graduates can be a tool that helps in reporting on the efficacy of the public school enterprise. Schools can use it to tell their story to the public, the news media and the politicians. Surveys of students can be used to inform parents and communities about school progress in meeting some NCLB requirements--beyond the required testing data.

Some school leaders have found it more efficient for them to buy this service from experts than to do it themselves.

Frank Galicki, principal of Dallas Senior High School in Dallas, Pa., reports survey results to his school board and chamber of commerce. "From the information we get from LifeTrack (a graduate survey firm based in Clarkston, Wash.), we know where our graduates attend college, how many enter the upper-level universities, what effect our AP courses have on their entry into honors programs," Galicki says. "We use the report as an evaluative instrument regarding curriculum and make adjustments based on information from the survey data. We learn how pleased graduates are with our services. We pay particular attention to comments on safety and look at other workforce-related issues such as who stays in or returns to the community after graduation."

Barbara Fitzsimmons, director of curriculum in North Kingstown, R.I., says her initial attempt to conduct a survey herself "had a dismal return rate." When the project was turned over to a professional firm, the return rates soared.

North Kingstown includes survey questions on English, math, science, technology and foreign languages, and the high school staff obtains a focus for its professional development from the survey data, which makes use of federal Title I money appropriate. Fitzsimmons says teachers look for hard data to demonstrate their growth in core subject areas.

One survey value revealed that graduates had a poor perception of the high school guidance department. "It has led to changing the structure and services we provide and to focused professional development for our guidance staff," she says. The service improvements contributed to a spike in satisfaction on the 18-month follow-up survey.

One byproduct of graduate surveying is sure to please a high school's senior class officers when it comes time to plan their next alumni reunion--easy access to an updated contact base for classmates.