By Anne Button

To complement the rich information gleaned from last year’s Campus Climate Survey of faculty and staff, the College will conduct a similar survey of students next week.

The Student Experience Survey will be administered from Feb. 28-March 13 by ModernThink, the same firm that implemented the faculty and staff survey in February 2010.

According to Interim Associate to the President for Diversity Myron Anderson, who chaired the 2009-10 Campus Climate Committee, the student survey will help Metro State leaders take the pulse of the student population, highlight programs that are working well and identify barriers that are detracting from students’ day-to-day experience and potentially impeding academic and/or social development.

Survey topics will include:

· academic support and faculty interaction

· personal development

· diversity

· campus environment

· community and pride

ModernThink is a management consulting firm that specializes in surveys of employees at institutions of higher education. The firm conducts the “Great Colleges to Work For” survey, results from which are posted in The Chronicle of Higher Education. According to Anderson, Metro State is one of the first institutions to pilot the student element of the Great Colleges to Work For program.

“Surveying the students was part of the original Campus Climate Survey plan,” says Anderson. The student survey was initially scheduled to occur concurrently with the faculty/staff survey, but the committee opted for a separate student survey administration.

ModernThink will survey a random sample of Metro State’s nearly 24,000 undergraduate students; 3,600 students, at each class level, will be selected at random and sent the survey electronically. Students will be provided with a unique username and password, and their responses will be confidential. Faculty and staff are asked to encourage the students selected to complete the survey.

The survey will allow the College to make key comparisons with peer institutions across the country, Anderson says. In addition, as the survey is expected to be conducted every two to three years, it will serve as a way for the College to benchmark its own progress.

The results of the 2010 faculty/staff Campus Climate Survey were a topic at the October 2010 Board of Trustees retreat and are being used to guide the current Strategic Planning process.

For more information on the Campus Climate Survey initiative, please call 303-352-4170 or go to the Campus Climate website.