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Senior Survey, Spring 2008

Comparisons Across Colleges

Undergraduate programs at CU-Boulder are housed in seven colleges or schools: Arts & Sciences (subdivided into arts and humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences), Architecture & Planning, Business, Education, Engineering & Applied Science, Journalism & Mass Communication, and Music. Survey responses, presented by college, can be found in a large Excel file; graphic representations of the data are also available by college. The latter provide an immediate, overall picture of variation by college--variation that may be more thoroughly explored by examining the data in the Excel file.

As the following table shows, the numbers of Senior Survey respondents from the various colleges vary widely.

Although the great majority (83%-92%) of seniors in all colleges would recommend CU-Boulder to a friend considering college, there are numerous differences across colleges in students' assessments of various aspects of their experience at CU-Boulder. For example:

• Overall, three quarters of seniors were satisfied with their academic experience. Greater proportions of music students (87%), however, and lower proportions of architecture and planning students (62%), reported satisfaction with their academic experience.
• Larger proportions of business students (81%) and engineering students (82%), compared with arts and humanities students (43%) and architecture and planning students (48%), reported that CU-Boulder prepared them well for the job market.
• When asked whether the benefits received from attending CU-Boulder were worth the financial costs, more than 80% of education students and engineering students agreed that they were; only about two thirds of music students, journalism students, and arts and humanities students agreed that the costs were worth the benefits.
• Although 56% of all seniors were satisfied with faculty concern for individual students, this number varied greatly by college--from as low as 40% in the College of Architecture and Planning to as high as 83% in the College of Music.
• A large percentage of business students (73%) expressed satisfaction with program space and facilities, compared with only 17% of music students and 26% of architecture and planning students. This finding is likely attributable, at least in part, to the recent renovation and expansion of the Leeds School of Business facilities.

Although only selected highlights from this extensive amount of data can be presented here, they provide examples of variation that may occur across colleges and, by extension, across majors. We encourage site users to use the links at the left to access the available data for investigation and exploration of by-college and/or by-major comparisons that may be of interest to them.

Last revision 06/30/08