Surveys Results Are Never What You Expect

People amaze me.

I often like to think that I've got a pretty good handle on people and what they think about things that relate to me. However, I'm learning that every time I think that I should survey them for their actual thoughts and bring myself down a peg or two.

These are two surveys we recently placed into our newsletters that we send out, one to high school students around the country and another to high school counselors around the country. I would have thought that the results would have come in about the same, but that wasn't so! The top poll is from the students and the bottom poll is the same poll taken of counselors.

What does this say about the perception high school students have about college? I wonder if being in the "real world", as the counselors are, they have a more pragmatic view of higher education than students do, leading them to feel less education is necessary to be competitive in today's workforce? Or is it an "at least" kind of thing, where the counselors feel that students need "at least" two years of higher education to be competitive (and of course more doesn't hurt either)? Add on top of that my answer would have been "none of the above" as I'm a huge

advocate for graduate school! (Of course it's not for everyone but I've enjoyed my graduate school experience so much more than my undergraduate coursework.)

This is where the simple answers get tough because we can only conjecture the reasoning behind it, but I am absolutely blown away at the significant difference of students feeling the need for a four year degree.

I would actually like to see the poll results of one more group- current college students. But then, I wonder if the response would again be significantly different between students attending a two year or four year school, or even public or private school. And I wonder how many of the students who are attending a two year school had counselors who answered two years to the question.

Unfortunately for me, as what usually happens, is this survey created more questions for me than it answered!

Any thoughts on these results?