The University of Iowa is launching the inaugural Iowa Student Experience Survey on April 7, 2025, to gather insights into student satisfaction, belonging, and financial concerns. This confidential survey, which takes just 10-15 minutes to complete, will remain open through May 16, 2025 and is designed to help the university better understand and improve the student experience.

The survey is open to all undergraduate students and graduate students in master’s and doctoral programs. Students who complete the survey will receive a 20% discount code for an item at the Iowa Hawk Shop as a thank you for their participation.

Why a New Survey?

The Iowa Student Experience Survey replaces the bi-annual SERU and gradSERU surveys, which were last administered at Iowa in 2022. This new survey is about one-fourth as long as SERU, mobile-friendly, and designed to be directly relevant to the university’s strategic priorities.

This shift to a homegrown survey will provide actionable insights that help shape initiatives and employ best practices aimed at enhancing the student experience.

Key Focus Areas of the Survey

Students will be asked to provide feedback in three primary areas:

• Financial concerns, basic needs, and student employment
• Sense of belonging students experience at the university
• Academic success and satisfaction

Survey responses will be used to help assess existing support for students and identify potential opportunities for better aligning university policies and resources with current student needs and challenges.

Confidential and Secure

Students will log into the survey using their Hawk ID, allowing the university to minimize demographic questions while ensuring each student completes the survey only once. All responses are confidential.  To maintain student confidentiality, no identifying information will be retained with the survey response data. Data will only be reported in aggregate for the university and for academic units with sufficiently high response rates.

This survey is jointly sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Graduate College. The six-week survey window at the end of the semester allows students to reflect on their experiences over the full academic year.

Links to both the undergraduate and graduate surveys are available at provost.uiowa.edu/student-experience.

How You Can Help

Faculty, staff, and student organizations are encouraged to support this effort by promoting the Iowa Student Experience Survey through their networks. A survey promotion toolkit is available, including:

• Social media graphics
• Email templates
• Posters and flyers
• Digital signage
• PowerPoint slides for presentations

Download the survey promotion kit and share these materials through your local channels to help amplify student participation.

For more information about the Iowa Student Experience Survey, visit provost.uiowa.edu/student-experience.