How to stop faculty workload conversations from stalling
It’s a tale as old as time: higher education leaders are being asked to do more with less. Questions about workload and resource allocation are growing increasingly common, and your institution needs answers more often than the traditional program review process can provide them. After all, decisions about course schedules, staffing, and design ripple across the institution, affecting budgets, student progress, and program viability.
To monitor instructional capacity and other key metrics, some institutions have moved to annual department program health “checkups” between formal program review cycles. In this blog post, I’ll summarize lessons learned from our work with dozens of campuses to implement regular program health checkups—including the data you need to gather and how to avoid common stall points—and offer strategies you can adopt this term.
What is an annual program checkup?
In higher education, an annual program checkup is an opportunity to assess the value an academic program is delivering to your students and your institution. Traditional program reviews occur every four to seven years. That cadence is helpful for strategy, but too infrequent to address day-to-day operations. An annual checkup keeps departments aligned to enrollment realities and student preferences. As well as a provost and a dean, each conversation should include the relevant department chair and a data analyst. Together, this group can interpret the data in context and agree on concrete adjustments to workload, scheduling, or staffing before small misalignments become systemic problems.
Context is key
Program health is a nuanced, sometimes contentious conversation. Assessing a program’s performance involves so much more than numbers and often gets to the heart of broader questions around your institution’s mission and values. In short, data can never tell the full story, and it shouldn’t; historical context, the real constraints on faculty time and institutional resources, and other factors should all be part of the conversation.
In the sections that follow, I outline several metrics that help institutions understand and compare program performance. But these data points should never be considered without context from department leaders.
4 workload questions and how annual program health checkups can help you can answer them
Rather than reopening the same conversations each term without resolution, program health checkups help leaders answer a focused set of workload questions—grounded in demand, curriculum design, and instructional capacity—and translate them into manageable, defensible actions. The four questions below are among the most common we see. If these questions are familiar to your institution, read on to see how a well-designed checkup can help you address them productively.
-
Should we adjust workload expectations for full-time faculty?
Work from cohort-appropriate comparisons, not a single institutional target. Normalize by course level and modality, and examine credit hours against SCH per instructor FTE over multiple terms. Look for gaps between current output and the upper‑quartile of similar peers; if a material gap exists, plan a phased move with guardrails to ensure you’re still meeting research and service obligations.
-
Do we have the right instructors teaching the right students?
Track how the mix of majors and non‑majors has shifted. If majors’ share of instructional time is declining but upper-division offerings are expanding, rebalance assignments toward high-demand lower-division or gateway courses. In growing programs, protect upper-division depth but monitor the proliferation of small sections.
-
Why can’t we keep all our small classes?
Distinguish intentionally small from unintentionally small. Set a target band for section size by level and an exception logreviewed each term. Pair any consolidation with visible reinvestment where demand and outcomes warrant to avoid a “cuts-only” narrative.
-
Are our max caps realistic?
Max caps are the backbone of your scheduling workflow. If they’re wrong, everything built on top of them (analytics, decisions, student outcomes) drifts off course. Audit once per term: flag sections with cap=0, wide cap variance across like sections, or drifting caps without rationale. Tie caps to pedagogy and rooms and use registration permissions/waitlists for true enrollment control.
What materials should you prepare for a program checkup?
A program health checkup should take place as a meeting, to give everyone the option to contribute insight and ask questions. To ensure everyone is on the same page, prepare a brief document in advance that includes both data covering the last three to five like terms (e.g. fall to fall) and narrative context for that data. This document should include these metrics along with their definitions:
1. Demand and utilization: Summarize how many seats students wanted and used.
| Metric | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Enrollments or SCH trend over three to five like terms | Show whether interest is rising, flat, or falling |
| Fill rate and seat utilization by course level | Compare the number of students enrolled to the max cap at census, broken out by lower‑division, upper‑division, and graduate |
| Percent of sections under 10 enrollments and their share of SCH | Highlight where very small sections consume capacity |
| Waitlist or “turn‑away” signals | Identify courses where students attempted to enroll but couldn’t, indicating unmet demand or timing issues |
2. Progression: Indicate how offerings support on‑time degree movement.
| Metric | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Gateway outcomes and repeat rates | Flag courses that slow students down via high DFW or repeats |
| Bottleneck courses | Areas with chronic scarcity or high attrition that impede sequencing |
| On‑time sequencing | Whether required courses are offered when students need them in the plan of study |
| Capacity and cost proxies | Describe how much teaching output current staffing produces |
| SCH per instructor FTE | A normalized view of instructional throughput over like terms |
| Sections per instructor and prep load | Context for assignment balance and sustainability |
| Adjunct or overload reliance | Where you’re backfilling demand in less sustainable ways |
3. Cap quality: Validate that max capacities are trustworthy.
| Metric | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Like-section cap variance | Spread between highest and lowest caps for the same course or modality; a large spread suggests your caps are based on preference |
| Mid-term cap changes | Look out for edits after schedule publication that muddy demand signals |
| Cap=0 flags | Instances where cap was set to zero to control enrollment rather than using waitlists/permissions |
The annual review document should also include these non-data elements to ensure any unique circumstances or broader context is provided in advance of the meeting:
- Narrative context (150–200 words). The chair summarizes wins, risks, and external drivers (curricular changes, market shifts, space constraints) that explain the numbers.
- Decision log. List last review’s commitments and the current status of each so accountability survives turnover.
- Guiding prompts for meeting discussion:
- Which small sections are intentional (seminars, labs, accreditation) and which are legacy carry-overs we can consolidate?
- Where do demand signals (historical fill, waitlists, student pathways) suggest shifting capacity
- Are max capacities credible and consistent, or are we adjusting to control enrollment throughout registration?
- What schedule or modality changes would remove student bottlenecks in high-demand courses?
Issues that might stall progress (and how to keep the conversation going)
Here are the most common challenges our partners have encountered as they institute annual program health checkups, along with practical ways to respond so program health conversations stay productive, evidence-informed, and focused on improvement.
Consistent data to power program health checkups
Trusted data is a critical component of successful annual program health checkups. EAB’s Edify team has built a set of templatized dashboards to provide Deans, Department Chairs, Provosts, and Chief Business Officers integrated data from the SIS, HR, finance, and other data systems. Fill out the form below to learn more.
Resource plan with confidence
Annual program checkups create a more consistent, transparent way to address faculty workload and instructional capacity. By revisiting a focused set of questions each year, involving the right academic and data leaders, and tracking decisions over time, provosts and deans can align workload with student demand, promote academic quality, and strengthen program sustainability. Over time, this approach builds trust, reduces uncertainty, and makes workload decisions not only easier to explain, but also easier to act on.
Ready to learn more?
If you want to automate program health checkups and ensure consistent metrics for productive discussion, Edify—EAB’s higher education data management platform—can help. Fill out the form to the right to speak to an expert and see a customized demo.
More Blogs
Do you have the right kind of small classes?
Why data is a cost saver, not a cost center
