Service Line: Integrated Research

For the second entry in Carnegie’s Summer Research Series, we analyzed responses from our May 2025 survey of more than 3,400 prospective students and parents. This report explores how families approach the college decision-making process—from how they search for information to what influences their choices, including the role of social media, content trust, and perceptions of influencers.

We’re excited to launch Targeted Research Surveys, a flexible suite of pre-built survey options that help community and technical colleges quickly collect meaningful feedback from students, faculty, and staff. Whether you’re looking to improve retention, strengthen community perception, or re-engage stop-outs, our surveys deliver the insights you need to drive strategic action.

Staying apprised of the latest changes in politics in the US this year basically constitutes a full-time job. Results from Carnegie’s May Deadline Survey suggest that prospective students, and even their parents, often have too many other topics on their minds to keep up with politics. When asked about the impact of politics on college choice, responses to our May 2025 survey were almost identical to those from a survey held shortly after the 2024 election.

Understanding how politics impacts prospective students and parents in their choices for college has potentially more weight than ever before. Carnegie completed research about politics and school choice in early 2024 that found personal ideologies being at odds with state-based political policies could result in dropping a school from a prospect’s list. 

Find out about graduating seniors’ needs, perceptions, and motivations so that your institution can achieve recruitment and enrollment goals. Learn more!

March Madness isn’t just about the excitement of buzzer-beaters and underdog victories; it’s also a stage where colleges and universities can shine or fade in the eyes of the public.

Data tells us things we can’t always see—both in communities close to us and those far away. For colleges recruiting students, this kind of demographic data is an invaluable resource.

With the increasing variety of graduate programs available, understanding your target audience is crucial to recruitment. Graduate students have long been treated as a monolith that can be marketed to exactly the same.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Carnegie would offer regular graduating senior surveys to its CollegeXpress audience. With the industry adjusted to a new normal, we began this effort anew and sought the opinions of students entering college in fall 2023.