How do I get colleges and universities to respond?

Spamming an entire university email system for a grad student's survey isn't going to happen, at the school I work at even pretty important stuff is opt-in. I would take a different tack and try contacting a group more likely to have the people you're interested in interviewing. Quality over quantity. The Society of Women Engineers, for example, might be actively interested in your work (and is a group I have been involved with.) The faculty advisor or student leadership for such groups would be a useful contact, and should be easily findable. Most scientific disciplines have professional societies with local chapters and student members. Profs who teach the big 100-level science and education courses might be willing to give you 30 seconds and some whiteboard space for a URL. Your advisors may even be willing to give extra credit for participation (I remember this being pretty standard practice in my psych classes.) The education departments at these schools might look more kindly on your requests, or have paths that they use to get the word out.

Besides those things others have mentioned, most universities have entirely separate IRB procedures for studies examining their own students, especially undergraduates. So if you are at University X and looking to do a survey at universities A, B, and C, you would actually also need approval from university A, B and Cs IRB for research on students in order for their to facilitate your research on their students. Universities tend to be protective of both their students and their reputations so this can be something of a hurdle. I'm surprised your advisor did not bring up the difficulty of this method when you made your proposal.

I see a lot of post it on facebook, put out an ad, etc. advice. Do not deploy any of this advice before talking with your committee. Not everyone giving this advice may understand how sampling works. Post a survey on FB to be filled out by whoever decides to click your link and your p-values are meaningless. Maybe your committee is ok with that (seriously, maybe they are. I'm not disparaging the idea, just telling you to check), but the project they approved was based on a sampling method that is more statistically sound. Do not assume without asking that they will be ok with less. If they are not ok with less, there are other statistically valid ways of sampling that you will have to look into, rather than just putting the survey out there for whomever.

I'm not surprised that no one will let you e-mail spam their entire student body for your survey; further, you go to a school with 40,000 students so it's not like you should need to involve other schools to find a large enough sample frame. If your survey is actually a short survey, without a need for personal information, I'd use the $400 that a tablet costs to deploy a http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/03/05/279669610/post-a-survey-on-mechanical-turk-and-watch-the-results-roll-in. Here's a good http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13428-011-0124-6

It takes years of rapport building to get access to student emails in the way you're describing. It is really unlikely that you'll get access. Why haven't you reviewed the literature on sampling this way? Where is your committee in this? IAAA, IANYA

Also, I wanted to say that I'm so sorry your advisors have failed you in this. They had the experience to know this would be a problem, and their poor communication is horribly unfair. Unfortunately it's not terribly unusual either.

Find a new survey method. Schools will not send your survey to their email lists.

As an alternative, there are unofficial facebook groups that will reach large swaths of students from schools, often organized by graduation year, faculty, etc. You might be able to get permission from the people (usually just random students) who manage those groups to post your survey and you'd reach potentially hundreds or thousands of students at a time.

If the target university has an Office of Institutional Assessment, I'd start there. They're typically the ones distributing surveys. (agreed that your advisors should be helping you, too)