Why am I being contacted as a university graduate?
Only graduates can give feedback on how they are shaping their career and how the knowledge and skills gained at university can be used.
Every university is obligated to create an exact picture of the effects of the education they provide. Thus, Section 7 of the German Higher Education Framework Act (Hochschulrahmengesetz) states that a course of study should “prepare students for a professional field of work and provide them accordingly with the specialist knowledge, skills and methods of the respective study programmes that are required for this”. Moreover, state legislation requires universities to evaluate their study programmes. The results from graduate studies are therefore used not least as part of the quality management and re-accreditation of study programmes.
What is the Graduate Study Cooperation Project (KOAB)?
As part of the cooperation project, all graduates of a graduating year are surveyed on their study and occupation. The collected data is used by the participating universities for the evaluation and quality management. The project also creates a scientific-use file, i.e. a research data set which is used for the processing of scientific questions.
Why does the survey take longer than five minutes?
Various questions arise within a university on the different levels and in different departments. So, for example, those responsible for the curricula hope to derive specific optimisation measures for the individual study programmes, whereas the university management would like to keep track of overarching quality aspects. The student advisory service and/or the careers service would like to use the feedback from graduates as a basis for their advisory services. The academic international office would welcome feedback on the effects of any overseas semesters on graduates’ careers, for example. And other central bodies are also interested in the impact that the university has on the regional pool of specialists. In addition to these questions, which arise in the individual universities, several other, central questions of university research and education monitoring are also covered at the same time.
This helps prevent graduates being invited to participate in numerous different surveys on several occasions, which taken together would place a considerably greater burden on the graduates.
Why is the study conducted in the form of a cooperation?
The strict separation of address and survey data is imperative: the university uses its existing address data to invite the graduates to participate in the survey. The responses provided by the graduates are not sent directly to the university, but rather are saved on the server of the Institute for Applied Statistics. The Institute for Applied Statistics has no further data such as the names or addresses of those surveyed and forwards only the processed survey data to the universities. This guarantees that the survey data cannot be linked to the names, addresses or email addresses of the graduates.
Another key advantage of the cooperation project is that overarching comparative values are generated. This is of great significance because it is not so easy to evaluate the results of a single survey. Let’s say, for example that the average value for a survey on the topic of “Utilisation of the knowledge learned in the study programme” was 2.5, where “1” was “very high” and “5” was “very low”. It is then quite difficult to analyse this average value. However, when state or national comparative values are available, these can be used as evaluation criteria. Put simply: if the national value is 1.5, a result of 2.5 is a clear alarm signal. In this way, the survey results can be used for a substantive and intersubjectively verifiable evaluation.
In addition, “scientific-use files” are also generated through the cooperation project. These publicly accessible research resources are special in that they do not specify individuals or individual universities and the anonymous information they contain can be used for the processing of overarching questions. They allow research, for example, on how many students in a federal state or nationwide transition from a bachelor’s programme to a master’s programme or on the degree of professional adequacy among university graduates. The results of such analyses can have an impact on university policy.
Economical utilisation of funds: universities are often funded by the public purse, i.e. through taxes, so it’s in everyone’s interests that these funds are used as efficiently as possible. Having the KOAB study carried out by a central body (ISTAT) is considerably cheaper for the tax payer than if every university were to set up and finance its own structures.