| In fact, 90 percent of our student surveys are now completed online. We've surveyed anywhere from 20-odd men at Deep Springs College (100 percent of the student body) to over 1,000 collegians at such colleges as Hofstra University, University of Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So how do we do it? All colleges and universities whose students we plan to survey are notified through our administrative contacts at the schools. We depend upon these contacts for assistance either in notifying the student body of our online survey, or, if the school opts for a paper version of the survey, in identifying common, high-traffic areas on campus at which to survey students, and to help us make any necessary arrangements as required by campus policies. In recent years, an increasing number of schools have chosen to send an e-mail to the entire student body about the availability of the online survey; this in some cases has yielded astonishing response rates.
Surveying truly is a continuous process—students can submit surveys online at any time—but we officially resurvey students at each school at least once every three years. Some of the schools profiled as part of the Best 366 Colleges: 2008 Edition and the top colleges Region by Region online feature were officially resurveyed this past year, but not all. Early on (we've been conducting these surveys since 1992) we surveyed all of the colleges and universities in the book on an annual basis. But we soon found that unless there's been some grand upheaval or administrative change on campus, there's little change in student opinion from one year to the next, but that shifts tended to emerge in a third or fourth year (as surveyed students leave or matriculate). With this in mind, we switched to a three-year cycle for resurveying. Colleges that wish to be resurveyed prior to their regular survey cycle are accommodated if at all possible. And of course, online surveys submitted by students outside of schools' normal survey cycles and independent of any solicitation on our part are always factored into the subsequent year's various calculations, so that the surveying process truly is ongoing.
The survey itself features more than 80 questions and is divided into several sections including: "About Yourself," "Your School's Academics/Administration," "Students," and "Life at Your School." We ask about all sorts of things, from "How many out-of-class hours do you spend studying each day?" to "How widely used is beer?" Most questions are multiple-response in nature, but eight are open-ended and offer students the opportunity to expand on their answers with narrative responses.
Once the surveys have been completed and the responses stored in our database, every college is given a score (similar to a GPA) for its students' answers to each multiple-response question. These scores enable us to gauge which aspects of the complete experience at each college rate highest and lowest according to the institution's own students and to compare student opinion from college to college. These comparisons form the basis of our 62 top-20 ranking lists. The narrative responses culled from surveys drive the "Students Say" text featured on school profiles. Student quotations expressed within this text are not chosen for their extreme nature, humor, or unique perspective. Rather, they are chosen because they represent the sentiments expressed by the majority of survey respondents from the college; or, they illustrate one side or another of a mixed bag of student opinion, in which case there will also appear a counterpoint within the text. And, of course, if testimonials accomplish this and are noteworthy for their wittiness, they'll be very likely to make it into the text.
The ranking lists and profiles in general seek to accomplish that which a college admissions viewbook by its very nature can never really achieve—an uncensored view of life at a particular college, crafted in recognition of the fact that not every college will appeal to every student. But that is the beauty of it. These are all very different schools with many different and wonderful things to offer. Our profiles and rankings aim to help students and parents answer that all-important question—"What is the best college for me?"
One last note: Our survey is qualitative and anecdotal rather than quantitative. In order to guard against producing a write-up that's off the mark for any particular college, we send our administrative contact at each school a copy of the profile we intend to publish with ample opportunity to respond with corrections, comments, and/or outright objections. In every case in which we receive requests for changes, we take careful measures to review the school's suggestions against the student survey data we collected and make appropriate changes when warranted. What is most compelling to us about how representative our survey findings are is this: We ask students who take the survey—after they have completed it—to review the information we published about their school in the previous year and grade us on its accuracy and validity. Year after year we've gotten high marks: This year, 81 percent of students said we were right on.
We hope you enjoy reading the information we've collected for each school profiled as part of the Best 366 Colleges: 2008 Edition and the top colleges Region by Region online feature. We've worked hard to make each school's profile an accurate representation of student sentiment on its campus. And remember—wherever you end up going to college, come back and tell us what you think about it at http://survey.review.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
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