Ohio State Graduate School earns top national ranking in completed student surveys

The Ohio State University Graduate School has earned the top national ranking in the number of surveys completed by students this year. Ohio State surpassed the longtime front-runner, the University of Texas at Austin.

The purpose of the biennial Graduate Student Experience in the Research University survey – also known as gradSERU – is to provide an overview of students’ experiences, said Graduate School Dean Mary Stromberger. The survey enables Ohio State graduate program administrators to understand which support services students may need in completing their courses of study while maintaining their health, she said.

“It helps us understand what graduate students are experiencing in all aspects of their education,” she said. “Not just what’s happening in the classroom, but their relationships with their mentors, for example, or whether or not they’re participating in professional development opportunities, how they are doing in terms of their well-being as related to their physical health and their mental health.”

The Graduate School first conducted the survey in 2023, and the data provided valuable insights, Stromberger said.

“I’m excited to see the data this year because not only will we get to benchmark our data with the data of the other universities that participated,” she said, “but we’ll also be able to benchmark it with the data from 2023.”

The students’ responses will enable the Graduate School team “to see where we’ve made improvements and where we need to continue putting in work to make things better.”

This year, the Graduate School raised its percentage of survey completions by 5% from 2023, when the school had a 15% completion rate – the third lowest in the nation. The team used a variety of methods to improve the response rate this year, said Matt Swift, Graduate School strategic communications program manager.

“We dove into response rates and email open rates to see which programs were opening [survey emails],” he said. “We reached out to those programs directly to make sure they were doing what they needed.”

To raise awareness of the importance of completing the survey, the team collaborated with Ohio State’s Council of Graduate Students, as well as graduate program chairs and coordinators. The team also worked to ensure responses represented as large a sample as possible of the student body. 

“This year, we focused really hard on making sure that it was a wide spread of all the different, almost 300 programs across the university,” Swift said.

Strategies employed by the Graduate School team to increase the survey completion rate included posting signs around campus with QR codes linking to the survey and placing an advertisement in The Lantern student newspaper’s wellness edition.

The team also placed a checklist item in BuckeyeLearn, Ohio State’s online tool to engage faculty, staff and student employees in training and professional development.

“Anytime a student went to go check their courses or grades, there was a to-do list item that was, ‘complete the graduate student survey,’” Swift said. “They were getting emails, but they also had this checklist item that they would see regularly.”

The Graduate School team also promoted the survey during a series of in-person events, including a pizza party, held during Graduate Student Appreciation Week April 7-11.

“We got to interact with the students and talk with them and hear their experiences and if they’d heard about the survey,” said Carly Logan, Graduate School education program specialist. “You started to recognize people, which I think was really great and really special. They were excited to see us and were like, ‘I did the survey. Thank you.’”

The concerted effort resulted in Ohio State’s Graduate School experiencing an increase in completed surveys when other universities saw a decrease, said Andrew Blatter, the school’s senior strategic planning analyst.

“Three or four weeks into our survey launch, the [national] gradSERU community scheduled a meeting for everyone to talk about how they were dealing with the low response rates,” he said. “And we were like, ‘Well, our numbers are up. Here are a couple of things that we’re trying to do,’ and we’ve shared what we tried to do. I’m very proud of the work that everybody did.”

In the final weeks of the survey, the Graduate School team further boosted the completion rate by sending out reminder emails that appealed to Buckeyes’ competitive spirit, Swift said.

“That last email that we sent to students and programs was, ‘We are so close to being No. 1 in the nation. We’re 150 completions away. Help us beat Texas,’” he said. “You couldn't ask for a better call for Buckeyes.”