> I guess my point is, I'm totally unsurprised that less-scrupulous employees faced with that hairball just said, eh, I'll make up that I successfully contacted

> I guess my point is, I'm totally unsurprised that less-scrupulous employees faced with that hairball just said, eh, I'll make up that I successfully contacted them, what harm could that do? -- and if that happens, you've got across-the-board confirmation bias going on, "of course our graduates land good jobs in the field." Well, my experience is that it's more of a selection bias than anything else. Not outright employee-not-wanting-to-do-their-job lying. When the calls go out to graduates to get employment data, the successful ones have no problems giving their data, while the unemployed ones hesitate. This can be seen where the percentage of graduates reporting data is given. This also happens with salary data, those working temp jobs or minimum wage don't as readily give out their salary data as those who are really successful early on. One seemingly effective way I've seen universities get more representative data has been to hold diplomas until a survey is filled out. Obviously this doesn't capture later data (like salaries/employment 9 months out), but it gives a good picture of recent graduate data with extremely high reporting percentages.