With decades of experience in public opinion polling and research, global management consulting giant Gallup Inc. has announced that it is launching a higher education survey project with Purdue University that is aimed at providing insight into how the college experience enables graduates to pursue life and career success.
This year, the project, known as the Gallup-Purdue Index, begins what will be the largest ever nationally representative study of college graduates, measuring the long-term pursuit of “great jobs” and “great lives” by graduates. The index is expected to deliver new insights to higher education leaders into how the educational experiences of their students can be improved. Funding support for the index has been made possible in part by a $2 million grant from the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation.
“Beginning in 2014, the new Gallup-Purdue Index will measure not only material success, asking college graduates such things as: Are you employed? How much do you earn? It will also measure those critical qualities that Gallup finds employers truly value and are predictive of work success: a person’s workplace engagement and well-being,” wrote Gallup CEO and chairman Jim Clifton and Purdue University president Mitch Daniels last month in the Wall Street Journal.
Among the specific study measures, the Gallup-Purdue Index will reveal how college graduates are faring on five dimensions of well-being. Those dimensions are purpose, social, physical, financial and community. The index will also measure workplace engagement, which includes information such as whether survey takers like what they do, do what they’re best at and have someone who cares about their development. The national benchmark study will survey 30,000 college graduates this coming spring.
Gallup and Purdue officials say their collaboration breaks new ground among the various college accountability and measurement projects that have emerged in recent years as American higher education has fallen under heightened scrutiny by political leaders, business executives, news media, education advocates and the general public. Along with the national effort that began with the Obama administration’s push in 2009 to boost American higher education productivity, a broad array of institutions, policymakers and advocates have promoted and implemented programs aimed at increasing degree completion and enhancing student readiness for the workforce.
“This is not a ranking,” said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. “We’re designing [the index] as a benchmark against which institutions can voluntarily choose to understand how their graduates are doing.” Busteed explained last month during a briefing on the new index that “there are a number of initiatives that are already under way and have been under way to try and measure colleges in different ways.”
