The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey is administered by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA. Informing colleges and universities since 1966, the CIRP Freshman Survey has collected data on over 13 million students at over 1,900 institutions, and is the largest American study of higher education. The CIRP Freshman Survey is designed to provide comprehensive information on your incoming first-year students. It can be used by itself, or, when used in conjunction with the Your First College Year Survey (YFCY) and the College Senior Survey (CSS), provides valuable baseline data for a longitudinal assessment. The CIRP Freshman Survey is used by researchers and practitioners to examine readiness for college, how students choose colleges, student values and beliefs about diversity and civic engagement, and student expectations.

Participating institutions receive a detailed profile of their entering freshman class, as well as national normative data for students in similar types of institutions. These campus profile reports, together with the national normative profile, provide important data that can be useful in a variety of program and policy areas:

• Admissions and recruitment
• Academic program development, review and self-assessment
• Institutional self-study and accreditation activities
• Public relations and advancement/development
• Institutional research and assessment
• Retention studies
• Longitudinal research about the impact of policies and programs

Although the normative data provided with the institutional reports (and published annually in The American Freshman) are based on the population of first-time, full-time freshmen, participating institutions also receive separate reports for their part-time and transfer students. Additionally, participating campuses can obtain supplemental reports profiling students by various subgroups (for example, by intended major or career, by academic ability, by home state).

The CIRP Freshman Survey is designed for administration to incoming first-year students before they start classes at your institution. The instrument collects extensive information that allows for a snapshot of what your incoming students are like before they experience college. Key sections of the survey examine:

• Established behaviors in high school;
• Academic preparedness;
• Admissions decisions;
• Expectations of college;
• Interactions with peers and faculty;
• Student values and goals and
• Student demographic characteristics; and
• Concerns about financing college.

Many of the items on the CIRP Freshman Survey are pre-test questions that are then post-tested on the two CIRP follow-up surveys, the YFCY and the CSS, providing for longitudinal examination of cognitive and affective growth during college. All CIRP surveys allow you to add questions of your own on the instrument.

  A copy of the 2008 questionnaire is posted here.

  The document denoting changes between the 2008 and 2007 instrument is posted here.

Web Survey Option
The CIRP Freshman Survey is conducted before students start their college careers, and is available as early as March and as late as October. Traditionally a paper survey, the CIRP Freshman survey is now available as a web survey. The new CIRP Web Portal (www.cirpsurveys.org) provides greater flexibility and ease of use when managing your survey administration.

The Paper Survey	is best when administered in a large-group setting during orientation, but is also used in classrooms, residence halls, or small groups. It can also be administered through the mail. You set the delivery date and the number of questionnaires needed. Your paper survey data is available just 3 weeks after your paper questionnaires arrive for scanning.
The Web Survey	can be administered either with your campus managing the email notification process, or for ease of use, you can elect to have HERI manage the email notifications to students. A web survey can be more convenient for both you and your students. Our new web portal allows you maximum flexibility in setting email notification and reminder dates, customized, “welcome” and “thank you” pages, customized email notifications, and input of additional questions. Throughout the administration, you can obtain updates on your response rate. Your survey data is available the day after a student completes the questionnaire.
The Paper & Web Survey Combination	enables your institution to enhance its response rate by using both methodologies for maximum exposure. Students may complete either version.

New Web Survey Features

• HERI can send customizable email notifications (including reminders) to your students
• Customizable “Welcome” and “Thank you” Screens
• Upload your own additional questions

• Entering students’ “habits of mind”
• Involvement of parents (or legal guardians’) with entering students’ college decision process

Institutional Profile
In December, campuses receive a detailed report profiling freshman responses from their institutions. This report provides an in-depth profile of freshmen men, freshmen women and all freshmen. In addition, the report includes separate profiles of transfer and part-time students. Finally, the report provides comparative normative data for freshmen entering similar types of institutions.

In addition to the campus profile report, and to facilitate further institutional analyses, CIRP survey results are available in the following electronic files:

Standard Data Services
These are included for each institution as a standard part of the CIRP Freshman survey participation.

• Data files
  Institutions will receive a file containing the individual responses of their respondents in a format designed for statistical analysis or for merging with other institutional data bases (such as transcript files).
• Reports on Spreadsheet
  Institutions will receive exact copies of the printed campus profiles in EXCEL spreadsheet format. With the results in computer-readable format, reader-friendly charts and graphs can be easily constructed.

Special Data Services
These can be ordered using the CIRP Data Services Order Form, or by contacting HERI’s Associate Director for Operations.

• Data Merge
  HERI will upon request merge the contents of a CIRP data file with a data file provided by an institution. The merge is effected using Social Security Number or local Institution ID as a key. Merged files can be used for deeper secondary analyses of the CIRP data, retention analysis, etc.
• 'Peer Group' Report
  An institution can order a report in Excel spreadsheet format comparing its results to the aggregated results of any five or more participating institutions. Specialized institutions for which the standard CIRP comparison groups are not sufficient (such as women’s colleges, engineering schools, etc.), or institutions that normally compare themselves to a specific "peer group", can use this report to create their own comparison groups.
• Group Code Report (formerly known as "Special Breakout Report ")
  Compare up to 190 subsets of students by taking advantage of the group code grids on the CIRP survey instrument. HERI will produce reports in EXCEL spreadsheet format containing the results for respondents that marked each group code.
• Other Special Reports
  HERI can produce an institutional profile (in EXCEL spreadsheet format) broken out by virtually any variable

FEES
Basic costs include an institutional participation fee of $675 plus a graduated survey processing fee structure. The institutional participation fee covers all the costs for the data collection, data processing, as well as preparation of campus reports; and includes all shipping costs (unless expedited shipping is necessary, in which case it is billed to your institution), your institutional profile in Excel spreadsheet format, as well as the raw survey data file in .DAT or SPSS format. Additional services are available at an additional cost.

The following table is the breakdown of the fees associated with the CSS:

STANDARD COSTS
Participation Fee		$675
Processing Fee		$2.00/per processed survey (first 500)
		$1.50/per processed survey (501-1000)
		$1.00/per processed survey (1001 or more)
OPTIONAL COSTS
Customized Welcome and Thank You Pages (for Web Administrations)		FREE
Integrated additional questions (for Web Administrations)		$300*
Email distribution to students (for Web Administrations)		$325*
Real-time Data Analysis		$475*†
† In 2008, institutions who sign up for the Bonus Opportunity (i.e. committing to participate in the current cycle administration of the TFS, YFCY, and CSS) will receive this service free across all three surveys. Should an institution not fulfill the commitment of participating in all three surveys, HERI will charge the regular amount of the service per survey project (assuming the institution has already started administration and data collection in the given survey) to the institution.
* In 2008, institutions who sign up for all three services will receive a $100 discount.

Your campus will only be charged for the surveys/log-in codes that are processed by our survey vendor. Unused surveys/log-in codes will not be billed

  Click here for a calculator to help estimate your costs.

Billing Policy
Upon registration, institutions are sent one bill for the participation fee. After each institution completes their survey administration and returns the data for processing, the per-survey processing fees are calculated and a second bill is sent to each institution for their respective processing charges. Institutions are also billed separately for any Data Service Orders they may place, and these bills are sent out after the completion and fulfillment of each Data Service Order.

Cancellations Policy
You may cancel without penalty up to the time that the questionnaires you have ordered have been mailed to you. If the questionniares have already been mailed and you return (at your expense) the entire shipment unmarked, you will not be charged the full participation fee, but will be charged a cancellation fee of $100. If you wish to cancel but cannot return the entire shipment unmarked, you will be charged the full participation fee.

Cancellation Policy for Schools Doing Web Administration
You may cancel without penalty up to the time that the unique web log-in codes have been sent to your institution, or distributed per your institution's direction. If the web log-in codes have already been sent to your institution or distributed via HERI's email distribution service to your intended survey participants, you will be charged a cancellation fee of $100. In addition, if HERI has provided any customized services at your request (e.g., incorporated on-line additional questions, etc), you will also be responsible for the full cost of these services.

HERI uses the following algorithm to determine whether or not a CIRP Freshman Survey respondent should be considered a first-time full-time freshman. Please note that the question numbers referred to below are based on the 2002 Freshman Survey.

RULE #1
IF a respondent indicates that he/she did not graduate from high school in the current year (Question #4) AND, IF the respondent reports having taken courses for credit at his/her freshman institution (Question #11) OR the respondent reports having taken any courses (for credit or not for credit) at any other postsecondary institution (Question #12) *,
THEN the respondent is considered “not first-time” (shown on the institutional profiles as a “transfer”).

RULE #2
IF a respondent fails the tests in Rule #1 (i.e., is considered a first-time respondent) AND indicates he/she is enrolling as a part-time respondent (Question #5),
THEN the respondent is considered “not full-time” (shown on the institutional profiles as “parttime”).

RULE #3
IF a respondent fails the tests in Rule #1 AND Rule #2,
THEN the respondent is considered a “first-time full-time freshman.”

RULE #4
IF the tests in Rule #1 or Rule #2 can not be performed because the respondent did not respond to any or all of Question #s 4,5, 11 and 12,
THEN the respondent is considered to have failed the test. That is, the algorithm assumes that the respondent is a first-time full-time freshman unless he/she passes the tests in Rule #1 or Rule #2. **

* The structure of Rule #1 is designed to account for respondents who took college courses during their high school career by requiring that they took at least one year off between high school graduation and college entry in order to pass the test. It is possible that a student who took college courses in high school and took a year or more off before entering college would incorrectly be considered a “not first-time” student, but HERI deems that to be a very low-probability occurrence.

** Please note that this Rule might cause a person to be considered a first-time full-time freshman when he/she in fact isn’t.

1 The broad categories of institutional type are defined as follows:

University	an institution that awards a substantial number of doctoral-level degrees in at least five different disciplines. The CIRP “university” is roughly equivalent to the Carnegie “Research” and “Doctoral” designations.
Four-year College	an institution that awards master- and/or bachelor-level degrees. Corresponds Equivalent to the Carnegie “Master’s (Comprehensive)” and “Baccalaureate (Liberal Arts)” designations.
Two-year College	an institution that awards associate-level degrees.

2 Selectivity is defined as the average SAT Composite Score of the entering class.

3 Institutions with unknown selectivity are grouped with the low-selectivity when computing the National Norms.

4 Two-year colleges and historically Black colleges & universities are not differentiated by selectivity.

These two files show each institution's participation history from 1966. Participation for a given year is indicated by an "@" or an "x". Institutions providing data judged to be representative of their first-time full-time freshman class and included in the national norms report are indicated by an "@". Campuses that participate in the survey but whose data were not included are indicated by an "x". Institutions that did not participate in a given year are indicated by a "-".

	Participation History Arranged Alphabetically
	Participation History Arranged By Stratification Cell