After years of doing research on students in their college years, John H. Pryor will now lead studies aimed at determining how graduates fare after they earn their degrees.
Mr. Pryor, formerly managing director of the University of California at Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute, joined Gallup Education’s higher-education division this month as a senior research scientist. There he will oversee research and analysis in the polling firm’s new Gallup-Purdue Index, which will survey more than 30,000 college graduates to assess what the polling agency calls “the most important outcomes of higher education": whether college graduates go on to have good jobs and good lives.
For eight years, Mr. Pryor, who is 51, led what is believed to be the largest empirical study of college students as director of HERI’s Cooperative Institutional Research Program.
The program’s signature report, the Freshman Survey, is now in its fifth decade. It surveys hundreds of thousands of college students annually, and from all angles: their activities and habits during high school; their career plans; and their values, attitudes, and beliefs.
At Gallup, Mr. Pryor says, he looks forward to taking a similarly broad approach. He will apply questions that Gallup has long explored in the general population—about employment and lifestyle—to higher education specifically. The answers, he thinks, will be both revealing and timely.
“There’s been a lot of scrutiny over what is the value of a college education,” Mr. Pryor says in an interview. “We really don’t know much about the long-term impact of college.”
This spring the new Gallup program will begin surveying college graduates, asking about their physical, social, and financial well-being and their perceptions of how college has shaped their lives and careers. Purdue University is the first institution to contract with the polling group for a sampling of all of its graduates. Gallup officials say 50 other institutions have expressed interest so far.
Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education, says that in building the new project, he was looking for someone who knew higher education from the inside, understood the world of institutional research, and had already been thinking about what happens to students after they graduate.
“That is a very short list to begin with,” Mr. Busteed says. But Mr. Pryor, whom he has known since 2000, seemed like a good fit—someone who could communicate research findings to all kinds of audiences, and who understands “the 50,000-foot level and the minutiae at the same time.”
Although Gallup’s headquarters are in Washington, Mr. Pryor says he will stay in Los Angeles and travel frequently. In the new job, for the first time in his career, he is not working on a college campus.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Virginia, he returned to Dartmouth and held a series of positions in the college’s health service and later at its medical school. For a decade after that, he was director of student-affairs planning, evaluation, and research there.
In 2005 he joined the Higher Education Research Institute as associate director. It was at UCLA that Mr. Pryor made his mark nationally, through his direction of the Freshman Survey. He would often present the survey findings at conferences, walking the audience through slides and charts about students’ behaviors and attitudes.
Exploring critical questions about higher education through national surveys is what drives his work, Mr. Pryor says. But the goal has never been just to find something interesting and present it in a series of colorful slides. The idea, he says, is to work with colleges and help them to interpret the data in a constructive way.
“That’s why we do this work,” he says. “We do it to make a difference, and that’s what I want to do at Gallup.”
He tries to be receptive to whatever surprises the data may hold. Curiosity is key, he says. “You can’t just look under the big rocks. You have to look under the pebbles, too.”
