Describe your institution, student group, and retention priorities. Makeform turns that brief into a focused survey about academic progress, finances, belonging, advising, wellbeing, and intent to continue, with branching that keeps each student's path relevant.
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Sample prompts for the builder
Choose a starting point, adapt the wording, or send it to the Makeform builder. Each structure is an example you can edit.
Audience
Current undergraduate students
Format
Anonymous survey with conditional follow-ups
Prompt size
460 chars
Example survey structure
Anonymous survey with conditional follow-ups
How likely are you to return next term?
How connected do you feel here?
Which barriers affect your continuation?
What would make staying easier?
Would you like a separate support link?
Suggested routing tags
Likely to return
Needs follow-up
Considering leaving
Ask about intent to return before asking why a student might leave; branching can then show only the relevant follow-up reasons.
Step 1
Listen
ask about experience, barriers, and belonging
Step 2
Segment
compare patterns by cohort and study stage
Step 3
Route
offer an optional path to appropriate support
Step 4
Improve
turn recurring themes into institutional action
Why retention surveys work
Enrollment records show who returned. A well-timed survey helps explain what students experience before that outcome, including pressures no administrative dataset can capture.
Combine ratings with optional comments so students can name the policy, interaction, or practical barrier behind a score.
Use branching so students considering departure see reason questions, while continuing students can describe what is helping them stay.
Use broad, purposeful profile fields to compare experiences across study stage, attendance mode, or program without collecting unnecessary identity data.
Survey moments
One annual questionnaire misses changing needs. Adapt the same core measures to distinct moments in the student journey.
Check academic expectations, early connection, and help-seeking before small problems become reasons to withdraw.
Measure intent to return alongside finances, workload, advising, and experiences with support services.
Give departments a consistent core survey plus targeted questions about curriculum, placement, studio, or lab experience.
Ask former students respectfully about their decision and, only when welcomed, what could make returning feasible.
Build the survey
Start with the decision your team needs to make, then design a concise path students can answer honestly.
Tell Makeform who will answer, when they will receive it, and whether the results will guide advising, scheduling, services, or program changes.
Replace assumptions with balanced scales, include not-applicable choices, and make personal questions optional when an answer is not essential.
Show targeted follow-ups based on return intent or low ratings, keeping the main route short for students without that issue.
Export responses, compare consistent measures, read comments in context, and communicate what the institution will examine or change.
Choose an approach
Match the survey design to the decision window and the amount of attention you can reasonably ask from students.
Field guide
Use six compact sections to connect intent with the academic, social, institutional, and practical conditions shaping a student's choice.
Continuation intent
Ask how likely the student is to continue next term or year and how confident they feel about completing the current period. Use a clear timeframe so answers are comparable.
Academic experience
Separate course challenge from unclear expectations, unavailable classes, or a poor program fit. Those experiences may require very different institutional responses.
Belonging
Belonging is easier to interpret when questions distinguish peer connection, classroom inclusion, and having at least one person at the institution to ask for help.
Support experience
A low service rating can mean a student did not know the service existed, could not reach it, or found it unhelpful. Ask those as separate steps.
Practical barriers
Tuition, housing, food, transport, work schedules, caregiving, technology, and wellbeing can affect continuation. Use optional multi-select questions and avoid demanding private detail.
Next step
Anonymous feedback and individual outreach have different privacy expectations. Let students finish anonymously, then offer a clearly separate optional route where they can share contact details for help.
Related tools
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Open toolFAQ
Practical answers for administrators designing a useful and respectful feedback process.
A student retention survey asks current or recently departed students about their intent to continue and the experiences influencing that decision. It connects enrollment intent with academics, belonging, advising, finances, scheduling, wellbeing, and other barriers so administrators can see recurring themes.
Choose a moment when the answers can still inform action. Common points include several weeks into a first term, before registration opens, after midterm results, and shortly after a student does not re-enroll. State the timeframe in the return-intent question.
Include likelihood of returning, confidence about current progress, academic experience, belonging, advising and support access, financial or practical barriers, and one optional open comment. Add only profile fields your team will actually use for analysis.
Anonymous responses can make sensitive feedback easier to share, but they cannot support direct follow-up. Explain the choice clearly. One useful design is an anonymous main survey followed by a separate optional support request where the student knowingly provides contact details.
Keep a pulse survey focused enough to complete on a phone. Use a small set of consistent scales, conditional follow-ups for relevant barriers, and optional comments. A broader annual experience survey can be longer when students understand its purpose and expected completion time.
First ask about likelihood of returning with a balanced scale. Then show a neutral multi-select list covering academic, financial, personal, scheduling, belonging, service, and other factors. Include none of these, prefer not to answer, and an optional write-in choice.
Yes. Makeform is unlimited free for generating, editing, publishing, and collecting responses. The paid tier removes the Makeform badge, so you can build and run the survey without a usage limit on the free tier.
Review scale patterns and comments together, compare only purposeful cohort groups, and avoid treating correlation as proof of cause. Assign recurring themes to teams that can investigate them, document planned actions, and tell students what was heard and what will be examined next.
Listen before enrollment decisions are final.
