UC to survey undergraduates

By Robert Salonga
Daily Bruin Staff

Beginning next week, Bruins will have a chance to evaluate their
undergraduate experience in a UC-wide effort that is the first of
its kind ““ and they can score some major cash in the
process.

Select UCLA students received an e-mail from UC President
Richard Atkinson inviting them to participate in a survey geared
toward changing policy affecting undergraduate life beyond
academics.

Students in the incoming classes of fall 1998, fall 2001, and
transfer students in fall 2000 and 2001 are eligible to fill out
the 30-minute UC Undergraduate Experience Survey about how they are
involved in academics and university culture.

“There are hundreds of questions we don’t know about
now,” said Richard Flacks, professor of sociology at UC Santa
Barbara and researcher for the UC Berkeley-based Center for Studies
in Higher Education.

E-mails were sent to about 60,000 students systemwide ““
13,000 of which are from UCLA. Flacks said it is the first such
effort in the nation on this scale.

“We’re trying to understand students’ feelings
of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in various dimensions,”
he said.

Those dimensions include how students are engaged in the UC
academically, intellectually, politically and through technology.
The survey will also allow students to identify or
“dis-identify” themselves with types such as
“jock” and “partygoer,” along with more
conventional categories, like “intellectual.”

Other concerns stem from the effect on undergraduate education
with the coming of Tidal Wave II, the coined term for 60,000
additional students entering the UC over the next decade.

“There are concerns about quality (of undergraduate
education) while we work through this,” said Robert Cox,
manager in the Office of Analysis & Information Management and
local liaison for the survey.

Eligible students will be contacted through e-mail and the
MyUCLA Web site, where a link to the survey will be posted.
Selected students at the Berkeley, Irvine, Riverside, Santa Barbara
and Santa Cruz campuses can take part in the survey this week.

Though a specific start date has not been set for UCLA, all
indications point toward a Fifth Week launch, Cox said.

Incentives to entice students to participate include a drawing
for $100 bookstore gift certificates ““ 10 will be given away
at each campus ““ and a grand prize of $2,002.

Researchers hope the survey will allow them to benchmark
undergraduate students’ sentiment about their time spent at
the UC.

“We’d like to see if (participants) could work with
us over a period of years,” Flacks said.

He added the reason for choosing the particular classes involved
are so they can track first-year students as they go through
college and also compare them with the experiences of fourth-year
students.

The test groups also correlate with changing patterns in
admissions policies, said John Douglass, senior research fellow at
the CSHE. Incoming students from the fall class of 1998 were the
first admitted under SP-1 and 2, policies that banned the
consideration of race in admissions and hiring systemwide.

The fall class of 2001 was the first admitted under Eligibility
in the Local Context ““ also known as the 4 Percent Plan
““ which guaranteed UC admission to students placing in the
top 4 percent of their individual high school class.

Cox said the project also made sure to include transfer students
of fall 2000 and 2001, which round out the rest of the survey
base.

“The theme of the transfer student experience is not
appreciated,” he said.

Transfer students have typically made up 35 percent of the
undergraduate student body at UCLA, Cox added. This year, that
number reached 42 percent, a recent high for what is considered a
prime transfer campus in California.

Students who fall into eligible categories for the survey but
have not been notified can go straight to the Web at
http://research.survey.

ucsb.edu/ucues/.