Rutgers University

OVERVIEW OF CIRP FRESHMAN SURVEY

Overview
The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) is a national longitudinal study of the American higher education system. Established in 1966 at the American Council on Education, CIRP is the nation’s largest and oldest empirical study of higher education. To date, over 15 million students at over 1,900 institutions have participated in the survey.

The CIRP Freshman Survey is designed for administration to incoming first-year students before they start classes at your institution. The survey collects extensive information that allows for a snapshot of what your incoming students are like before they experience college, including: established behaviors in high school; academic preparedness; admissions decisions; expectations of college; interactions with peers and faculty; student values and goals; student demographic characteristics; and concerns about financing college. Click here to learn more about the CIRP Freshman Survey.

Currently, all three Rutgers campuses participate in the CIRP Freshman Survey on different administration schedules.

Reports

Participating institutions receive a detailed profile of their entering freshman class, as well as national normative data for students in similar types of institutions. In the development of its national norms, CIRP sets certain criteria that determines which institutions are included, which are determined by the representativeness of its respondent population. Based on these response rates, "weights" are developed and applied to represent the population of entering first-time full-time first-year students for various selectivity strata. It is important to remember when comparing each campus of the university to their respective peer groups that these normative data are based on a limited (and possibly skewed) number of institutions.