SCU Graduating Senior: User Guide and FAQ

A local longitudinal survey designed to measure and assess graduating seniors’ experiences at SCU, including but not limited to: involvement in co-curricular activities, mental health, compassion, sustainability, social entrepreneurship, ethical decision-making, vocation, and Jesuit values. Administered in the spring quarter to all Santa Clara graduating seniors. This survey has replaced the CSS-HERI College Senior Survey.

Please submit your questions, feedback, or requests for additional data via InstitutionalResearch@scu.edu

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the SCU Graduating Senior Survey?

The SCU Graduating Senior Survey is a local longitudinal survey designed to assess graduating seniors’ experiences at SCU, including, but not limited to, involvement in co-curricular activities, mental health, compassion, sustainability, social entrepreneurship, ethical decision-making, vocation, and Jesuit values. Initiated in spring 2023, this survey replaces the CSS-HERI College Senior Survey.

Who is responsible for administering the Senior Survey?

The Office of Institutional Research (IR) is responsible for administering the Senior Survey at Santa Clara University.

Who is surveyed?

For the 2025-2026 academic year, the survey was sent to all undergraduate Fall and Winter term degree completers, and those who petitioned to graduate in the Spring and Summer term.

When is the Senior Survey administered?

The Senior Survey is administered during the Spring quarter of every academic year. The most recent data collection period was mid-May 2026 to mid-June 2026. The next administration is planned for Fall 2026.

The survey is administered through Qualtrics.

Are Senior Survey responses confidential?

Yes. IR links responses for longitudinal tracking and student demographic breakouts. Individual responses are kept confidential and reported only in aggregate. This means your individual answers will not be shared with anyone outside the Office of Institutional Research, and data are reported only as institutional or group-level statistics.

Key Terms

Completions Academic Year

Refers to class year (e.g., "2024–2025" refers to the "Class of 2025")
Academic Year: September 1–August 31 (e.g., August 2024 graduates are part of the Class of 2024)

Years

Filter by year, or select multiple years, to see changes over time and identify trends

Cohort

For seniors, filter by first-time students vs. transfer students.
Cohort indicates whether a student entered Santa Clara as a first-time student or transferred in

Sex (Demographic Breakout)

Break down engagement data by sex (female, male)

First Generation

Filter by first-generation student status to understand engagement patterns for students whose parents did not earn a four-year college degree

Program of Study (Major)

Break down data by the students’ major

Survey Questions: Where to Start?

Select different Themes and Constructs to filter question items and explore different facets of student experience.

Themes

The visualization offers a dropdown for Themes that allows you to focus on different aspects of student experience:

Executive Summary: A high-level overview of key engagement metrics.
Senior Survey-specific Themes: Focused explorations of particular engagement dimensions, such as Health and Wellness, Meaning and Purpose, Sustainability, and others.

Constructs

Constructs are unobserved qualities like mental health or conscientiousness which are measured by asking a series of relevant questions and generating an overall score.

Constructs on the Senior Survey that are derived from psychometrically validated instruments include:

Grit items: derived from Grit Scale
Anxiety, Depression, Wellness items: derived from PROMIS-29+2.
Compassion items: derived from SCU Brief Compassion Scale
Ethics items: derived from SCU Ethics Scale
Vocation items: derived from SCU Vocation Scale

Butler/Purpose items: derived from SWISS Construct of Meaning

Helpful Features

Hover Over Bars to See Details
Reading Box & Whiskers	Two-tone box — the box is split into a darker lower half and a lighter upper half, divided by a thin line at the median. The dark band spans Q1 to the median; the light band spans the median to Q3. It's not two separate statistics — it's one box, colored to make the median easy to spot at a glance. Labeled number inside the box — that's the median value for that category. Whiskers — the thin lines above and below the box extend to the highest and lowest values that is considered "typical" (within 1.5×IQR of the box edges) — not necessarily the true min/max of the data. Dots beyond the whiskers — these are outliers: individual data points that fall outside that 1.5×IQR range. Box height (top of light band to bottom of dark band) — this is the IQR, showing where the middle 50% of programs/clusters fall. A taller box means more spread among that group.
Click to Highlight Specific Data
Filter Data
Response Rate by Plan	The bar graph will show the percentage of students who responded to the survey. To see the total number surveyed, hover over the bar graph. (In the example below, 1,460 students were surveyed, and 54% responded.)
Downloading	Step 1: Click the Download icon in the bottom right corner. Step 2: Choose a format to download.