20 questions to ask alumni

Graduate feedback is an essential resource for college and university administrators, and alumni surveys are a great way to gather that feedback. When you’re building an alumni survey, you first need to decide what your goals are: What do you want to learn? Then you can design questions that help you meet those goals.

If you need some help drafting your alumni survey questions, read on to learn about the types of questions you can ask and check out some examples. Finally, we’ll show how Jotform can help you create an effective alumni survey.

What are alumni survey questions?

Alumni survey questions collect insight into former students’ feelings about their university experiences and where they’ve gone in their lives since they graduated. These questions can help administrators understand how they can improve the college experience for future students. 

Why are alumni survey questions important?

Colleges and universities want to give their students the best experience and education possible. Learning about past students’ actual thoughts and experiences is a key part of doing that — you can identify what you’re doing well and what needs to be improved.

You can ask alumni how satisfied they were with their experience, what suggestions they have for what could be done differently, where they’ve ended up in terms of employment or further education, and more. Their answers can point to ways colleges can improve for current and future students.

Alumni surveys can also help in other ways. By engaging with graduates and showing that you value their feedback, you can help cultivate relationships with them long after graduation.

Sustaining those relationships is a great way to build your school’s reputation and gather donations. It can also help strengthen resources for current students, as engaged alumni networks can assist future graduates with job searches and career advice.

What data can you collect from alumni surveys?

When you’re building a network of alumni, one data point is always crucial: contact information. You can use alumni surveys to collect phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and more.

You can also use these surveys to gather feedback about alumni’s college experiences, including quantitative measurements, like satisfaction rating scales, and qualitative data, like student stories and suggestions.

Who benefits from alumni surveys?

Alumni, current and future students, and school administrators can all benefit from alumni surveys.

Schools receive valuable information they can use to create better experiences and resources for current and future students. Alumni can also benefit by feeling engaged with their alma mater.

Types of questions to ask alumni

Contact information

Is the address you have on file for your alum current? If you’re still sending emails to the graduate’s school email address — or regular mail to their parents’ address — chances are there’s a better way to reach them. People tend to relocate more often in the years immediately following graduation, so it can be easy to have old addresses on file.

Here are some questions you can ask alumni to gather contact information:

• What’s your current home address, email, and phone number?
• What’s the best method of reaching you?

Employment

Some of the best feedback you can get comes from alumni who’ve just graduated. Job and internship searches will be fresh in their minds. It’s important to ask questions about how they found employment — they might share tactics that would be helpful for seniors who are close to graduation.

It’s also useful to have real data on job placement to track the effectiveness of your current career resource offerings and spot any gaps. You can also use employment and industry information to promote the school to prospective students.

Here are some employment-related questions to ask alumni:

• How long did it take you to find work after graduation?
  • Ensure the answer field can only be filled with numbers to make your data easy to analyze and sort.
• What industry are you currently working in?
• Is your current job directly related to your college major?
• Do you feel our school adequately prepared you to find a job and participate in the workforce?

Graduate school

Not every alum will go on to pursue a graduate degree, but for those who do, it’s useful to collect data on acceptance rates, areas of study, and more. It’s also helpful to know if and why a graduate chose to stick with your school for their next degree or look elsewhere.

Here are some questions about graduate school you might include:

• Did you attend graduate school?
• Where did you enroll in graduate school?
• Was the graduate degree offered at our school?
• If yes, why did you or didn’t you consider our school for graduate studies?

Engagement

Alumni events — like social gatherings, reunions, networking events, and conferences — are an important way schools stay connected with graduates, build strong alumni communities, and gather donations. Ask questions about alumni events to see what type of events resonate most and how often graduates engage with them.

You can also use these questions to identify and recruit volunteers for alumni speaking events, which can be a great resource for current students.

You might consider asking these questions:

• Have you attended any alumni events at the school?
• Have you returned to campus for any reason? If yes, why?
• Did you attend any events with alumni as a student, and did you find them helpful?
• Would you be willing to speak at an alumni event?
• Would you be willing to make a donation to the school?

Overall satisfaction

Questions about how satisfied alumni are with their college experience can help schools evaluate performance. It can be helpful to ask former students these questions once they’ve been in the post-school world for a few years and can reflect on their time with a bit of distance.

Ask how satisfied students were with educational quality, social opportunities, career resources, and more. You might want to use a rating scale to gather quantitative data for analysis.

You might include questions like these:

• On a scale from 1–10, how satisfied were you with your overall experience at our school?
  • You can also use Likert scale questions, with a range of answer options from “Very unsatisfied” to “Very satisfied.”
  • Break this question down into evaluations of specific parts of the overall experience to identify the specific areas where you’re doing well and where you could improve.
• On a scale from 1–10, how likely are you to recommend our school to someone else?
• Do you have any suggestions about how we could have improved your experience?
• What were the most positive aspects of your time at our school?
• Do you have any additional comments on your experience?

Tips for conducting an alumni survey

Here are a few tips for conducting an effective alumni survey:

• Set clear goals for what you’re hoping to learn from alumni feedback. For example, maybe you want to focus specifically on educational quality, or maybe you want to learn about alumni’s social experiences. Do you want to gather numerical data, or do you want to hear personal stories? Identifying your goals will help you ask the most relevant questions and choose the appropriate question types.
• Put the most essential questions at the top of the alumni feedback survey. Have you ever started filling out a survey and then realized halfway through that the form required more effort than you expected? You’re not the only one. Ensuring respondents answer the most important questions when they’re paying the most attention can help make submissions more useful.
• Incentivize alumni to complete your survey. This can increase your response rate. You could offer respondents a chance to win a gift card or send them discount codes for college merchandise.

Things to avoid with alumni surveys

While you develop a survey for your alumni network, keep an eye out for missteps:

• Avoid sending the survey during the holidays. Your survey could have a higher level of nonresponse if you send it while alumni are busy with family and travel.
• Keep the survey relatively short and straightforward. Long surveys and difficult questions could result in incomplete or unreturned surveys.
• Use an easy, accessible, mobile-friendly survey platform. With people managing so much of their online lives on their phones, you want to make sure your survey can be easily filled out from a mobile device. If your survey lacks mobile compatibility and looks clunky on a small screen, respondents may just give up on filling it out.

Ready-to-use survey templates with Jotform

Jotform is a powerful survey-building tool that can help you efficiently build an effective alumni survey. You can build a new survey from scratch, or, if you want to get a quick start, Jotform offers more than 2,000 survey templates you can easily customize to fit your needs. 

Whether you’re designing a new survey or customizing a template, Jotform’s drag-and-drop interface makes the process a breeze. Add questions, choosing from a variety of question types, including rating scales, star ratings, multiple-choice, open-ended, and more. Use conditional logic to personalize the survey and ask specific groups of respondents specific questions.

Easily change the survey’s fonts, colors, and layout, and add logos to match your branding. You can even add a payment gateway through one of Jotform’s 30-plus payment processor integrations to collect donations at the end of your survey.

When you’re finished building your survey, you can share it with an email, a link, a social media post, or a QR code, or embed it into your website.

If you’re looking for more form functionality, check out over 150 alumni form templates that you can adapt to specific use cases. Whether you need an alumni survey, a contact directory form, an information update form, or an event registration form, we have you covered.

How to analyze alumni survey questions with Jotform

Jotform can help you analyze your survey’s results as well as build and share your surveys. Use Jotform’s Report Builder to automatically generate customizable visual reports based on survey submissions. You can share the reports with a link, embed them into a website, or save them as PDFs.

Jotform’s Form Analytics feature can also help you understand how your survey is performing. Use this tool to review details like form traffic, engagement time, devices used, and more to see how you can improve the overall survey experience.