DAN QUAGLIANA
News Editor
Everyone knows that some departments and majors on campus are in better places than others. But before now, it was impossible to accurately determine how well each department was doing.
On Sept. 15, Academic Affairs released updated Academic Program Health data scores, as agreed upon by University Senate.
University Senate, the governing body on campus, is composed “of faculty representatives from every academic department and area and professional staff/management representatives from each of the four university divisions on campus,” according to their website.
Last semester, they created a joint task force with the goal of developing an algorithm to determine the “health” of the different departments on campus as well as the majors within these departments. History and social studies adolescent education, for example, are both majors within the history department.
Dr. Mary Beth Sievens, a history professor and co-chair of the Joint Task Force on Academic Program Health (JTFAPH), detailed the specific purpose behind the data collection. Sievans said that, “The point of the data is to encourage departments to evaluate the various programs that they are responsible for, and to see if there are any ways that they can work to improve these programs.”
“This is essentially a program review of our overall curriculum,” Executive Vice President and Provost Dr. David Starrett specified. “The task force, which was faculty-led, was a joint initiative between faculty and administration to accomplish this periodic review of our academic program array.”
The word “health” is not being used to talk about how many students are enrolled in any given major, but rather the ability of the major to retain and graduate students. If a student starts out as a social studies adolescent ed. major, for example, but then switches to political science halfway through their first year, the history department will get credit for retaining that student, but the political science department will get credit for graduating them.
“The committee [JTFAPH] began by reading a rather small body of literature on how to assess program health, as opposed to the rather large body of work on how to assess program quality,” Sievens said. “After having read that, we really thought and had many conversations about ‘What are the factors? What are the dates? What is the data we want to look at to determine program health?’ And that’s really where we spent most of our time.”
The task force reviewed different types of data, such as enrollment averages, retention rates, graduation rates and faculty-to-student ratios.
In terms of financial health, the task force developed a revenue-to-cost ratio in terms of faculty salaries and student credit — the university’s main revenue generator.
“We routinely reported back to [University] Senate about the status of our discussions and talked about…the major points we [are] considering and including in this formula,” Sievens added. “Because people were saying ‘Well, let’s include this and that,’ we also…[created] a list of what we’re calling ‘contextual data’ — things that data might not exist for across all programs.”
An example of contextual data is including how a department impacts students not enrolled in it. For example, most of the science programs require their students to take courses in the mathematics department, which would then contribute to the science department. Faculty were encouraged to use that kind of data in their responses to the administration when they talk about their program health.
“There may be cases in which the administration would like to see faculty in these programs do specific things, and [they] then have the opportunity to tell the faculty that,” Sievens said.
As for what happens after faculty submit their plans to the administration, they “Will then give constructive feedback on the plan, including conversation with the responding departments or programs,” Starrett explained. “What we’re looking for are plans that help improve the health of the program. All programs have the opportunity for improvement. [If a program can’t get their health up,] there is no action to be taken, there is simply feedback and encouragement on the plans for improvement.”
Dan Quagliana, the author of this article, in his capacity as a voting member of University Senate, was a student representative on the Joint Task Force on Academic Program Health.