Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, was given access to a new report to be released by the Gallup-Purdue Index Project which attempts to measure a college value based on a survey of graduates’ “professed engagement in their employment and their assessments of their own well-being, as determined by their reported satisfaction with five dimensions of life: their relationships, their physical health, their community, their economic situation and their sense of purpose”.  Bruni descibes the project as follows:

“A joint project of Gallup and Purdue University, it’s called the Gallup-Purdue Index, and its goal, as stated in the 2013 announcement of it, is “to conduct the largest representative study of college graduates in United States history.”

After surveying about 30,000 college graduates of all ages, the index released a first report in May of 2014. The number of graduates who have been surveyed is now up to 60,000, and a second report is due at the end of this month. The researchers gave me an advance look at its highlights, which amplify the initial conclusions, include some new discoveries and challenge conventional wisdom, especially about the power of an elite school to put its alumni on a guaranteed path to success.

The index measures success not in dollars and lofty job titles but in graduates’ professed engagement in their employment and, separately, their assessments of their own well-being, as determined by their reported satisfaction with five dimensions of life: their relationships, their physical health, their community, their economic situation and their sense of purpose.

The percentage of graduates who described themselves as thriving in all five of those areas varied little based on the kind of school they’d attended or the regard in which that school was conventionally (if disputably) held. It was 10 percent for all graduates, 11 percent for those who had gone to schools ranked among the top 50 national universities by U.S. News & World Report, and 13 percent for graduates of schools ranked among the top 50 liberal arts colleges.  It was 10 percent for those who had gone to public schools and 11 percent for those who had gone to private nonprofit ones: no significant divergence there. In fact the only category of school whose graduates reported lower levels of satisfaction was for-profit institutions, which, to judge by the index, aren’t serving their students nearly well enough.

As for graduates’ engagement in their employment, 39 percent of all respondents professed serious commitment to, and enthusiasm about, their jobs. The breakdown of this again suggested minimal advantage to a private school or an especially selective one. While 39 percent of public-school graduates were engaged in work, 40 percent of graduates of private nonprofit schools were. For graduates of national universities in the top 50, the figure was 41 percent. It did tick upward — but only to 47 percent — for graduates of top 50 liberal arts colleges.

Other questions in the index sought to determine how graduates felt about their alma maters, and these did reveal some distinctions, though never enormous ones.

While only 24 percent of all graduates strongly agreed with the statement that they could not imagine a world without the school they attended, 35 percent of graduates of top 50 liberal arts colleges and 34 percent of graduates of top 50 national universities said as much.

While only 29 percent of all graduates and 33 percent of graduates of top 50 national universities strongly agreed that their schools prepared them well for life, 40 percent of graduates of top 50 liberal arts colleges did. Highly ranked colleges outperformed highly ranked universities by a bit in several categories.

By asking graduates a wide variety of additional, smartly conceived questions about how they spent their time in college, the index gets at those facets of college that are relevant to graduates’ welfare in the decades after school.”

Bruni also mentions that the report indicates that important aspects of a college experience include the impact of mentors, semester projects and other positive influences. “The index didn’t merely find that certain kinds of people approached college in a fruitful way; it found that actual behaviors, independent of character type, had enduring benefits.”

He concludes that “The overarching takeaway from this ambitious canvas of the college experience is something that should be obvious but is too often overlooked, especially in these brand-fixated times:

What college gives you hinges almost entirely on what you give it.”

Yes!

Tony