FAQs

There is no fee to participate since ModernThink underwrites the program. Free participation includes administration of the full ModernThink Higher Education Insight Survey to a sample of up to 600 of your faculty and staff, real-time response rate monitoring, up to seven emailed survey reminders (sent to non-respondents only), and a series of four Participation Reports that include external benchmarks and year-over-year benchmarks (if applicable).

Most non-profit, higher education institutions located in the United States with a student enrollment of at least 500 in the prior academic year are eligible to participate. We vet every registrant and will contact you if there is an issue with your institution’s eligibility.

The Primary Contact is the central point of contact for critical program updates and will be responsible for meeting program deadlines such as completing the Institution Questionnaire. The street address provided for the Primary Contact is where we will send a hard copy of the Higher Education Workplace Summary, as well as a copy of the recognition insert published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in September. 

The Secondary Contact will be copied on SOME of the important program updates sent throughout the program. They should plan to step in if/when the Primary Contact is not able to ensure that an institution is meeting all program requirements.

The IT Contact is central to Connectivity Testing in February. They are responsible for white-listing the below email addresses, domains, and IP addresses and will be asked to participate in testing survey accessibility. They may also be called on to troubleshoot issues with survey distribution. Please see IT Requirements for more information.

From: surveys@modernthink.net,
Return-path: surveys@modernthink.net,
Trusted & Dedicated IP Address: 149.72.139.47
Secondary IP Address: 54.240.46.220

Participating institutions will receive regular email updates and reminders of upcoming program deadlines and milestones throughout the program process. Any questions can be directed to greatcolleges@modernthink.com.

The Primary and Secondary Contacts will receive an email with access to their Administrative Portal in February. That portal calculates your required sample for you, and will list how many employee emails are required per Job Category based on the employee counts provided during registration. If you have questions about your survey sample, please email greatcolleges@modernthink.com. Please see the Timeline for when exactly you can expect to receive the email with Administrative Portal access.

The survey contains 55 statements, 5 Faculty Experience statements, 20 benefits questions, 2 open response questions, and 8 voluntary demographics. Completing the entire survey takes about 20 minutes.

The faculty/staff survey is highly customizable even within the requirements of the Great Colleges program, including survey statements, open response questions, benefits, and demographics. The survey will need to be administered between February and late March to be part of the program. See Customization or email greatcolleges@modernthink.com for more information.

Completion time will vary but we estimate it taking about 4-6 hours to finish the IQ. We provide six weeks minimum to work on the IQ and if you’ve participated in the program in the last two years, we will pre-populate about two-thirds of the IQ with your prior submission to make updating your responses easier. We recommend you review the IQ early and divide up the work of answering the questions among multiple members of your survey team.

While there is no set minimum response rate we require institutions to achieve, we do take confidence levels and margins of error into consideration when determining recognition. If we do not have a representative dataset for your institution we cannot recognize it, so it is important to educate your community about the survey and promote participation as early as possible. You can license the Great Colleges program logo for free to use in your promotions and we provide communication templates as well.

There is no minimum response rate for the IQ but we do ask that you substantively complete it as this is an important tool we use in determining recognition. Please remember that even if your prior submission pre-populates, we require that you review and update that submission in order to qualify for recognition.

It is important that we ensure as even a playing field as possible across all our participating institutions so that we can fairly determine recognition in the Great Colleges program. Because our participants have widely varying budgets for incentives, we strictly prohibit the use of incentives across all participants. While you are allowed to broadly encourage participation in the survey by offering, say, a pizza party for all faculty and staff if the institution as a whole garners a certain response rate, you are not allowed to isolate individuals for survey participation by, say, giving the first 100 respondents $25 gift cards, or trying to deduce which individuals have not completed their survey and threatening them in some way. If you have questions about promoting survey participation without incentives, please contact us at greatcolleges@modernthink.com.

Union employee should be part of your random sample pool of faculty and staff along with everyone else.

The difference in response rates between paper surveys and online surveys is so significant that we no longer offer paper surveys as an option in the Great Colleges program unless you pay to customize your survey. Email us at greatcolleges@modernthink.com if you have questions about survey methods or have interest in customizing your survey.

We do not provide access to raw data. This is because we commit to all participating institutions and respondents that we will protect confidentiality by, among other things, never giving institutions access to individual survey records. You can read more about our confidentiality policies, or you can contact us with specific questions or concerns at greatcolleges@modernthnk.com. You will instead receive as part of the free program a series of Participation Reports with summary data from your survey, plus high level benchmarking. Or you can purchase more in-depth reports, if you prefer.