Almost a year after its administration, the results of a survey gauging “campus climate” and various aspects of student life were released at a University Council meeting in early February.
Minority leaders had mixed feelings about the results, including suggestions on how to improve the survey by including more specific questions about certain student demographics and the timing of the survey.
The Perception of Undergraduate Life and Student Experiences survey was an 11-page questionnaire administered in March of last year. Its purpose was to assess students’ experiences on campus.
The response rate was 35 percent, and some students feel this low percentage could be attributed to the release dates of the survey.
The initial e-mail was sent out the last day of spring break and the due date was the Sunday of Spring Fling weekend — two factors that some felt deterred students from completing the questionnaire.
“You can’t force students to take the survey, and the timing of the survey was not ideal,” Wharton sophomore and UMOJA chairman Jeffrey Tillus said.
He added that minority leaders — including those of UMOJA, the Lambda Alliance, the Asian Pacific Student Coalition, the Latino Coalition and the United Minorities Council — are pleased with having data regarding student comfort on campus, but that in the future, it would be best for the University to put out the survey during more opportune times.
“We want the response rate to be higher so we’re really going to be listening carefully,” Vice Provost for Education Andrew Binns said.
“If there were issues like that, we definitely want to know them and the next time we do such a survey during the academic year, we’ll take special notice of those questions,” he added.
Wharton and College junior and APSC chairman Rohan Grover said in the future, he’d also like to see a desegregation of the data pertaining to the Asian Pacific American community.
“The APA community contains a spectrum of ethnic backgrounds, immigration statuses, socio-economic backgrounds, and I would not be surprised to see a wide variation among those groups in the APA community,” he said.
Wharton and Engineering sophomore and Lambda Alliance chairman Tyler Ernst said the exclusion of data pertaining to transgender students was “interesting for a survey that has as its goal the inclusion of everyone,” but added that privacy concerns could be a possible reason why this was done.
College junior Roxana Moussavian — the co-chairwoman of PRISM, the campus interfaith group — added that in the future, she would also like to see inclusion of data pertaining to religious differences on campus.
She felt “surprised that a survey that was created to compare Penn to our peer institutions hasn’t been utilized to its fullest capacity by comparing us in light of religious communities, religious diversity and conversations regarding comfort about religion.”
Binns added that the survey questions “came as a result of interactions with student leaders.”
He said the next time the survey is administered, the University would certainly consider asking more questions about religion.
“Clearly the results show that in many respects, we have plenty more we have yet to do, but I also think that it supports the work that the coalitions have been doing … and the administration’s responsiveness to those issues,” UMC Chairman and Wharton and Nursing junior G.J. Melendez-Torres said.
