In the first alumni study of its scope, a Harvard survey is asking around 20,000 former Harvard students who graduated up to 40 years ago to reflect on their lives after leaving Harvard.

Lee Professor of Economics Claudia Goldin, Allison Professor of Economics Lawrence F. Katz, and Bryce A. Ward designed the “Harvard and Beyond” survey.

This 12-part questionnaire is part of an ongoing project examining the career and family transitions of American men and women who have attended college. It asks Harvard alums who matriculated in the years from 1965 to 1968, 1975 to 1978, and 1985 to 1988 about their education, employment, and family.

“Women are more likely to graduate from college, yet when we look at the labor market, there are still differences favoring men,” said Katz, who is researching “where in the life process those differences occur, and how constraints changed over time.”

The survey leaders anticipated that alums with “non-linear” trajectories might find it harder to encapsulate their experiences with the answer choices and allowed two free-form answers to “capture everyone.”

Jessica S. Banthin ’81 used the qualitative space to explain her “subtle trade-off” when settling into a “quiet career” with more flexibility because she wanted to spend time with her children. As a division director in the Center for Financing, Access, and Cost Trends, Banthin said she holds a “safe job,” and not one in public policy that would have required overtime and unexpected late nights.

Whereas most surveys inquire about current experience, the Harvard survey is more retrospective and achieves comparability by asking respondents to remember common transition points such as their first job and the birth of their first child.

“You can’t ask the ideal question, you have to ask the questions that can be compared,” Katz said.

Stephen D. Biddle ’81 said he was a “bit surprised” that the questions on political ideology asked only about economic and social policy. But this senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations found “Harvard and Beyond” to be more precise and not a victim of what he called a “common pathology,” with answer sets that aren’t exhaustive or don’t correspond to actual responses.

As the basis for their own survey, the principal investigators looked at previous surveys, including the Mellon Foundation’s deacde-old study, “College and Beyond,” long considered a seminal work.

College and Beyond targeted 34 selective colleges, but Harvard did not take part. Goldin and Katz’s study analyzes a wider range of cohorts than the two its namesake investigated.

In addition to the three groups of four graduating classes, the investigators also included the Radcliffe Class of 1973 to establish a gender balance and the Class of 1988 as a test survey class.

According to Ward, 30 to 40 percent of those who have received the online survey have responded. As an incentive for completion, study participants can vote for one of four groups that will receive a $10,000 donation, a feature that Daniel L. Bowles ’81, the chief operating officer of a Presbyterian church, found “intriguing” but was not the reason he filled out his survey.

The survey will be published at the end of this academic year.

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.