One day after the release of an independent study of University Health Services (UHS) found just 58 percent of students rated their overall care as good or better, health care providers at other schools said they faced similar problems but lacked similar survey data to quantify them.

Harvard is one of the only universities in the country to assess health care quality by surveying a random sample of its undergraduate population--including non-UHS users--through e-mail and mail, according to Rosenthal.

And so, when UHS officials went looking for a similar survey at another university, they couldn't find one.

"We can't find any good benchmarks," said UHS Director David S. Rosenthal '59.

MIT and Yale have plans to undertake random-sample studies like Harvard's in the future, Rosenthal said. But at the present time, MIT, Yale and Princeton only survey students after they receive care from their health services.

"[Ours] was not that kind of survey--we do those all the time," Rosenthal said.

Rosenthal says--and schools who survey students after health appointments agree--that this method of surveying probably produces disproportionately positive feedback. This is because many of the students survey have just come from having their problems diagnosed and treated.

"It is a bit self-serving, I would agree," said Elizabeth Langan, director of administrative services at Princeton University Health Services.

She said the satisfaction rate in surveys distributed to exiting patients at Princeton generally ran in the 80th percentile or above.