HBS Launches Alumni Survey
Starting in January 2004, HBS will begin an annual alumni survey to gain a better understanding of how the School’s graduates define success and the role the HBS experience has played in helping them to achieve it.
“This survey has important implications across the entire School — in admissions, career services, curriculum development, executive education, alumni relations, and publishing,” says David Lampe, the School’s executive director of Marketing and Communications.
The survey, developed and administered with the help of the independent firm Cogent Research, will go to all MBA classes marking a reunion year, plus alumni who are two years out — a critical time of transition for many grads. The initial survey will be sent to the 2003 MBA reunion classes. It is designed to take about twenty minutes to complete, and responses will be anonymous. Results each year will be shared with alumni — and the media, as appropriate. A related survey for Executive Education alumni is also on the drawing board.
Plans for the HBS survey were nudged along last spring when Business Week set out for the first time to survey graduates of thirty leading business schools to assess the value of an MBA. The magazine asked the schools to provide contact information for the Class of 1992. Five business schools — Wharton, MIT Sloan, Yale, the Marshall School at the University of Southern California, and HBS — declined.
“At HBS, we have a long-standing policy to protect privacy by not facilitating access to our alumni by any commercial organization,” explains Lampe. “Although we had made exceptions for journalistic surveys in the past, the increasing scale of these activities, their lack of rigor and meaning, and their clear commercial significance to the publications underscored the need for us to be consistent moving forward.”
The School has since denied access to alumni lists to Forbes, Fortune, the Financial Times, and the Economist. “Although we continue to provide basic data about the School, the publications have had to track down alumni contacts on their own, as they do when they cover other industries,” says Lampe. “It is interesting to note that we are still doing well in their rankings.”
