College grads grade their higher education

If a college degree is supposed to be the ticket to a better life, most schools have room to improve, suggests a national survey of more than 30,000 graduates.

About four in 10 respondents (39%) reported feeling intellectually and emotionally connected in their workplace. Just 11% reported high levels of personal well-being, defined as "how people think about and experience their lives."

The survey, conducted online Feb. 4 through March 7 by Gallup and Purdue University, was developed to help schools gauge their effectiveness in preparing students for long-term success.

Purdue will begin surveying its alumni in the near future. More participating schools are likely to be announced today.

"When college is done right, it has a profound effect on your life and your career," says Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. "But that's not happening for the majority of college graduates."

Purdue teamed with the Gallup research organization as part of his plan to improve accountability, university president Mitch Daniels said earlier this year. He wanted to measure both "the material success of our graduates" and "their readiness for increasing levels of leadership in their chosen fields, and their overall fulfillment in life."

The findings also send a message to students and their parents as they decide where to apply for college: The secret to success is not where you enroll, but what happens when you're there.

Among key findings:

• It didn't matter whether a graduate attended a public or private non-profit college, a highly selective institution or a less-selective one. Nor did it matter where a school landed in US News & World Report rankings.

• Graduates of for-profit colleges were less likely to be engaged and thriving.

• Graduates of smaller schools were slightly less likely to be engaged than grads of larger schools, defined in the study as those with enrollments of more than 10,000.

• The study also found no differences by race or ethnicity or by whether the graduate had been the first in his or her family to attend college.

• Age matters. Those who graduated in 2010 or later were far less likely to report high levels of well-being compared with older graduates.

• The more a student owed upon graduation, the less likely he or she will be thriving. Graduates who earned their degree in four years were twice as likely to be engaged in their jobs as people who took longer.

Other institutions, including Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, N.C., are developing their own instruments.

A study of well-being "is really an outgrowth of our goals, which is that we educate the whole student," says Penny Rue, vice president for campus life at Wake Forest. "We just want to be able to know that we're making difference."