Questions

• Are there really no relationships between the state schools/community colleges?
• Can we determine a cause for this?
• Is there a relationship between endowment size, student body size, or school prestige and the number of links?
• Did we just not find links between student governments and schools because we were looking in the wrong places and talking to the wrong people, or was the lack of links caused by the real lack of connections between the Boston area schools.

Recommendations

• Try to use synchronous forms of communication wherever possible (ie. telephone or face-to-face)
• Avoid asynchronous communication because the response rate is unnaceptably low and the time until responses are received is FAR too long
• Don't even think of trying a web survey unless you will be able to spam hundreds of thousands of email inboxes
• START WITH WHAT YOU KNOW!  ==> We made the mistake of jumping headlong into researching and contacting schools we knew nothing about.  A better approach would have been to start well-connected groups and individuals at Tufts, since we know our own school well.
• Contact groups or individuals that focus on a specific issue or have a well-defined role in the community; find links through them.