Every year, The Phillipian carries out the State of the Academy, a campus-wide survey that aims to gather important demographic and comprehensive trends of our community. However, this year, due to lower completion rates, the survey was extended twice, even prompting a promise of raising Raising Canes if we were to achieve a participation turnout above 80%. Unfortunately, we were only able to reach a turnout of 76%, very similar to the turnout for last year’s SOTA, which was 74%. With 24% of non-participation this year, it is clear that the persistent apathy must be addressed, as SOTA encompasses a unique role in our community. In order to increase this participation turnout, the survey should be mandatory and administered in a manner akin to the administration-based surveys we do during advisory. By making it mandatory, we would rectify the high non-response bias that occurs when around a fourth of our campus doesn’t participate, and allow for a greater understanding of the academy’s conditions and growth.
The SOTA is The Phillipian’s attempt to make a public survey in which both students and faculty can understand how the community views different issues, such as politics, education, economic class, and other important topics. Additionally, The Phillipian wants SOTA to show “how students are navigating academics, personal relationships, and their wellbeing”. However, a campus-wide survey only works if it actually represents the campus, and when 20-25% of the students consistently don’t respond, we lose representativeness. The numbers illustrate this problem. If we estimate that the school’s current population is around 1170, based on the 76.0% turnout of 889 students that did do it, 24.0% is 281 students who didn’t do the survey. Nearly the size of one whole grade, this is a population that would have given important information in the survey, like distinct perspectives on EBI, academic pressure, and campus culture. This is a problem, because when a quarter of our community has no voice, we risk inflating support for certain policies or missing unvoiced concerns.
A mandatory SOTA would potentially resolve multiple problems: it eliminates logistical barriers, ensures near-universal participation, and signals that student voice matters. Research shows that in-class survey administration dramatically increases completion rates. For example, an approach by the University of Minnesota Medical School made course evaluations a required institutional expectation, ultimately leading to a response rate that rose from 50% to 94% without much pushback. Of course, differences can arise between course evaluations and campus-wide surveys, but Andover can adapt this proven method for our concerns with low turnout.
Interestingly, this problem of low turnout affects not only academic environments, but also many democracies across the world. In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the ultimate winner was neither candidate, but rather a landslide for ‘Did Not Vote’. Around 36% of eligible voters didn’t vote, a population so massive that, within the framework of the Electoral College, “Did Not Vote” would have earned 265 electoral college votes to Trump’s 175 and Harris’s 98. In order to combat this, countries like Australia have compulsory voting and shifted elections to Saturdays. Due to these policies, Australia consistently secures turnouts upwards of 90%. While the scales and purposes of Australia’s voting system is noticeably different from ours, we can emulate a change with SOTA. If we can repeatedly get higher turnouts, our voices and collective trends would be much more faithful, just as a democracy that has more participation is more representative of the population’s wants.
One potential problem with a mandatory survey is faulty submissions. When we make the survey mandatory, students could refrain from answering genuinely, because it feels like another “useless” survey. When this happens, the survey becomes less credible as a whole and could lose its value as a trend evaluator. However, this would be easily treated with code-based cleansing if a submission is clearly an unserious submission. For example, a common phenomena of unserious survey taking is “survey straightlining”, where a high number of answers are on the same box, like “very satisfied”. If the data organizers realize that a submission crosses a certain threshold of choosing the same option, let’s say 80% of the time, the submission could be automatically flagged for further investigation. Despite the potential for unserious submissions, a theoretical 95% response rate with 5% noisy data would be much more reliable than our current state of a 76% response rate with an unknown bias. Ultimately, we’d be trading a small risk for a massive representation gain.
Andover positions itself as a community valuing student input, but allowing more than a fifth of the population to be removed from consideration undermines this ideal. The answer is having a time block, like advisory, where the survey can be administered. This would theoretically solve the low turnout and the important input from the silent population. If Andover wants a better understanding of trend development in the student body, having a sturdier foundation for SOTA is our best bet. Hopefully, the act of making it mandatory will reinforce the importance of the student voice.
