Graduate student perceptions of their graduate experience: an informational tool for academic programs and graduate schools

Addressing graduate student needs is important to both retaining those students as well as to the recruitment of future students. The current project surveyed graduate students enrolled in a large public research university spanning Masters and Doctoral programs across a wide range of disciplines. Students provided their judgments of their motivations and feelings, program performance, and faculty mentor as well as program characteristics and demographics. An exploratory factor analysis revealed five factors underlying their judgments: program effectiveness (9 questions), mentor quality (8 questions), the importance of student and faculty diversity (4 questions), scholarly experiences (4 questions), and their feelings of inclusion (4 questions). Demographics and key program characteristics were used to predict scores on these five factors which, in turn, were used to predict whether a student would recommend their program to others. Measures of program effectiveness and feeling included best predicted program recommendations; the quality of mentoring and desire for diversity had secondary but notable predictive power. Variable predictiveness can inform resource allocation to potentially improve graduate program practices.