Chief academic officers and deans have increasingly realized that meeting enrollment, cost efficiency, and student success goals requires change at the academic department level. Essentially all academic programs are housed within these units, which are responsible for enrolling, educating, and awarding credentials to students.
From a budgetary perspective, 44% of public institution and 51% of private institution costs reside in these units as well, allocated largely toward faculty salaries, benefits, and facilities costs. Yet the department chairs leading these units rarely have the training and skills needed to effectively align activities with important strategic goals—if they even know how to translate strategic goals into goals for their own departments.
Improving on these goals requires a more data-informed approach to decision-making and resource allocation at the department level. Unfortunately, the metrics and goals that apply at the institutional level do not help departmental and faculty leaders understand how their regular responsibilities and decisions drive institutional change.
Though department chairs may feel disconnected from the strategic plan and institution-wide objectives, they influence decisions from faculty hiring to course scheduling to curricular choices that can determine whether the institution meets its strategic goals.
The first step to showing chairs and faculty their role in driving strategy is to choose metrics and analyses that isolate the roles and responsibilities of departments aligned with institutional goals.
Academic leaders need the support of departments and their faculty to improve institutional graduation rates. Unfortunately, metrics like four- and six-year graduation rates hold departments accountable for activities that occurred during students’ first two years when they may have little interaction with the department’s faculty or curriculum.
Instead of tracking departments’ overall graduation rates, a better approach is to measure the junior graduation rate, or the two- and four-year graduation rates and time to degree of students in the major who already have 60 credits. The junior graduation rate allows departments to focus on what they can control and avoids creating unrealistic expectations around the department’s role in shaping students’ first two years.
Having the right data and analyses in place will not guarantee that they inform and guide departmental action. Provosts and their teams, working with academic units, need to create an ongoing, annual process to review data, set goals, and diagnose departmental challenges. The process must provide clarity as to what actions departments need to take, how they will take those actions, and why they are important.
It also needs to be informed by data that is from an agreed-upon source and placed in an institutional context. The most effective evaluation processes have six principles in common: annual repetition, a centrally provided dataset, open access to data, meaningful incentives, transparent resource decisions, and a focused set of individualized goals for each unit.
Rather than immediately closing departments that struggle to meet their annual review goals, academic leaders should place these departments on a watchlist and set 2-3-year objectives that they must achieve to keep struggling programs open.
Often, departments will revitalize their own offerings through new programming, courses, or experiential learning opportunities. Some may redesign their curricula entirely, launch new programs, or even consider mergers with other departments to better align with student needs. In all cases, criteria for watchlists should be clear, measurable, and shared with department leaders well in advance of review.
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