In October 2021, New York Tech undertook its first Climate Survey to help assess and improve our community's culture and environment as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion. While New York Tech is regularly recognized as having one of the most diverse student bodies in the region, we understand that recognition brings with it a responsibility to work toward creating and sustaining a culture of inclusion that offers access to a meaningful teaching, learning, and working environment.

The participation of the New York Tech community in this survey has been crucial in helping us identify areas where we are meeting expectations as well as those in need of additional resources to make New York Tech a more inclusive, innovative institute of higher education.

New York Tech strives for a student-centered culture of care, inclusivity, and respect for all community members. We are committed to a data-informed culture infused with a mindset of continuous program improvement.

Background

In order to make sure that we fully understand the climate for diversity, equity, and inclusion at New York Tech, the DEI Taskforce embarked on a thorough investigation of methods by which we could assess New York Tech's campus climate. Our search was guided by three primary criteria. The selected survey would need to:

• Compare ourselves to other institutions.
• Be methodologically rigorous and supported by robust research.
• Address our primary areas of interest, asking most of the questions we wanted answered, while providing the flexibility to make any necessary changes.

After an extensive review process, we selected the HEDS Campus Climate Survey as the survey that best fulfilled our criteria as the optimal survey tool.

Goals

The HEDS Climate Survey will allow us to achieve the following important goals and objectives:

• Gain a better understanding of the experiences and perceptions of students, faculty, and staff with regards to diversity, equity, and inclusion both in aggregate across the university and individually on each of our campuses and locations.
• Acquire a baseline for DEI perceptions and a benchmark against which we can measure future progress.
• Identify the areas where improvements need to be made and where they can have the greatest impact.
• Compare ourselves to other higher ed institutions to better understand what issues are unique to New York Tech and which are shared across other colleges and universities and how they are being successfully addressed.
• Collect data to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on community members and what issues of equity the epidemic may have highlighted.
• Inform the priorities of New York Tech and its newly formed Office of Equity and Inclusion led by Brian Harper, M.D., M.P.H.

If you have questions about the survey, please feel free to contact us at dei@nyit.edu.