COACHE Survey

WSU is participating in the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) faculty job satisfaction survey, operated by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The COACHE survey is a powerful instrument, facilitating data collection on faculty work and life concerns, benchmarked against peer institutions. Created and operated by faculty, the data will be used to identify needs and opportunities to improve faculty recruitment, retention, and work/life quality. Questions assess career- and tenure-track faculty views on university policies, practices, and working conditions such as tenure and promotion, climate, workload and support, compensation and benefits, and global satisfaction. The survey also will allow us to identify equity gaps in all those categories and to address those gaps more effectively.

Data collected through the COACHE survey will be confidential, which means we will be unable to link any responses to an individual at WSU. We have requested not to receive a breakdown by department in order to preserve anonymity of individuals in smaller departments.

Please see WSU’s COACHE FAQs here.

How can I take the survey?

All full-time career-track and tenure-track faculty will receive an email with a unique link from COACHE (coachefaculty@opinioncast.com), directing you to the online survey. We anticipate that the survey will take approximately 25 minutes to complete. If you have not received a link by February 10, 2022, please email coache.survey@wsu.edu.

Survey timeline

The survey will be open from February 7-April 12, 2022, and COACHE will provide reports to WSU in the fall of 2022. Following receipt, a core committee of WSU faculty researchers, led by Faculty Senate Chair Dr. Doug Call and Senior Vice Provost Dr. Laura Hill, will engage in an in-depth review of the data. The committee will then engage with a group of faculty to prioritize action items to provide the greatest benefit to WSU faculty. These results and plans for next steps will be shared with faculty at events including both Faculty Senate and various committee meetings.

As of March 28, 2022, WSU has a COACHE Survey response rate of 48.70% and a completion rate of 36.90%.

How will the faculty benefit from results?

The COACHE survey data will be used to directly engage faculty concerns and equity gaps as we develop policy to improve faculty satisfaction. Recommendations from a careful review of the data will lead to an investment in meaningful and lasting change in the faculty work environment.

Data privacy

During the recruitment phase of the survey, your name and email addresses are retained by COACHE (not anyone at WSU) solely for the sake of COACHE research. When COACHE submits the survey report to WSU, only the de-identified data is shown in the report. This means, no identifiers are matched to reported response, and at no time will any personnel on WSU’s campuses have access to any data containing identifying information. We have requested not to receive a breakdown by the department to preserve anonymity in responses from small departments. Finally, as part of our memorandum of understanding with COACHE, no administrators in Academic Affairs or HRS will have access to unit-level data. COACHE also ensures participant anonymity in all output, including data released and correspondent reports. This is all meant to protect the identity of respondents. Additional information on data privacy can be found in the COACHE FAQs.

Questions?

For questions about the COACHE Survey, please email coache.survey@wsu.edu.