This series of reports presents findings from the 2000-2001 Graduating Senior Survey at NC State. Students from all nine undergraduate academic units who graduated in December 2000 or May 2001 (AY00-01) are included.

This introductory report describes the survey�s methodology and provides a demographic profile of survey respondents in comparison to AY00-01 graduates. Specifically, it compares the gender, race/ethnicity¹, and academic unit of survey respondents with those characteristics of the AY00-01 graduates. A separate report, "2000-2001 Graduating Senior Survey: All Respondents," focuses on each individual survey topic. Tables with gender and racial/ethnic comparisons, as well as comparisons between colleges, are available on the web.

Students planning on graduating in December 2000 or May 2001 were eligible to complete the Graduating Senior Survey, which was available on the web or on paper. Those graduating with more than one major could complete a survey only for their primary major, as defined by university records. Academic departments were responsible for choosing through which mode - web or paper - their graduates would take the survey (41 departments chose the web option, and 11 the paper). Departments were also responsible for informing their students about the survey and for distributing the paper version of it. Both "web" and "paper" departments typically connected the survey to the Application for Degree process. Some departments choosing the paper option administered it in a required senior seminar or during an exit interview. Office of Institutional Planning and Research staff provided departments information to follow-up with non-respondents.

Of the 3,254 students who graduated in Fall 2000 or Spring 2001, 2031 (62.4%) completed and returned usable surveys. Another 219 students returned surveys but are not included either because the student who had applied to graduate did not actually graduate (n=214) or gave incomplete information (n=5).

Overall, spring graduates were more likely than fall graduates to complete the survey². When combining both Fall and December graduates, those asked to do the paper version of the survey had a slightly higher response rate than those asked to do it on the web.

The data obtained from survey respondents were analyzed using standard statistical methods³. These reports attempt to provide a level of detail that makes the data more accessible and interpretable to the user. A primary purpose is to highlight patterns found in responses to related question items or between comparison groups. Such consistencies among items or between groups are usually more important for understanding the data than are the sizes of the differences between individual pairs of ratings or ranks or, to some extent, whether the differences are statistically significant. While some individual small differences might actually be statistically significant, they may not be substantively meaningful. On the other hand, when even relatively small differences yield consistent patterns within a similar series of questions, the results are potentially more telling.

The margin of error for the senior survey is low � under 1 percent (+0.82%) at a 95 percent confidence interval. That is, if 75.7 percent of the respondents said they would choose NC State again, we can be 95 percent sure that the true figure would be between 74.88 percent (75.7 - 0.82) and 76.52 percent (75.7 + 0.82) if all graduating seniors had responded to the survey⁴. The margin of error increases as the sample size decreases, so statements for various subgroups, such as the separate figures reported for whites and African Americans, are less precise than statements based on the total sample.

Gender and Race/Ethnicity (Table 2-2)

There are no significant gender or racial/ethnic differences between the AY00-01 graduating senior classes and those seniors who completed surveys. Women make up 43.3 percent of the senior class population, compared to 42.2 percent of the survey respondents. White students account for 84.4 percent of the senior population, 7.8 percent are African American, and 8.0 percent are other minorities. Among survey respondents, 84.9 percent are white, 6.8 percent African American, and 8.3 percent other minorities.

Academic Unit (Table 2-3)

Table 2-3 shows enrollment of the combined AY00-01 graduating senior classes and survey respondents by academic unit. In general, colleges are accurately represented in the survey, with similar proportions of survey respondents and graduating class members. However, due to their relatively low response rates, College of Design and College of Textiles graduates are slightly underrepresented.