Most Student Affairs units/departments are required to conduct a comprehensive Program Review every eight years. Units that are externally accredited (Student Health, Counseling Center, Childcare Services) will be exempt because they are being evaluated regularly by their external accrediting agencies.

All other units/departments will be on an eight-year rotation for external reviews. Prior to your review, your unit will need to:

  1. Think about whether there is a specific area you would like your external reviewers to focus on or if you have specific questions for which you would like their recommendations
  2. Discuss how to pay for the review with your AVC
  3. Write and assemble your self-study report (see below – done by your unit’s staff)
  4. Select well-qualified external relevant external reviewers (usually two but can be one or three, discuss with your AVC)
  5. Ask your reviewers what they will need from you, get those materials to them
  6. Organize the site visit: logistics (transportation, hotel, meals), set up meetings with those they want to meet with, organize any focus groups they want to hold, and arrange for them to be paid and the timing of payment and reimbursements 

After your review, the unit director will need to:

  1. Carefully read the report you will receive from your external reviewers
  2. Discuss the report’s recommendations with your AVC and with your unit’s staff
  3. Based on the discussions in #2, decide what changes you will make, if any, in response to the reviewers’ recommendations
  4. Develop a timeline (and budget, if relevant) for making these changes
  5. Write your response to the reviewers’ report, usually focusing on any planned changes and why you decided to make these changes based on the information in the report, and timelines for those changes
  6. Give a copy of your response report to your AVC and the Director of Assessment, Research, and Evaluation
  7. Ideally, post the reviewers’ report and your response on your website, though this step is not mandatory

When and How Often?

Look at the schedule to see when your assigned year is. Your in-depth assessment report should be one of many useful documents to provide to your external reviewers so for most units, you will be doing your in-depth assessment the year prior to your external program review. We plan to repeat this eight-year cycle indefinitely, even though only eight years are listed in the chart.

You should start planning for your program review in summer or fall quarter so that the entire process, including your response, can be completed within a 12-15 month period. In other words, if you are assigned to 2024-25, you should start planning for your review in spring, summer, or fall of 2024, and complete all steps of the process by December, 2025.

How to Begin

Start by thinking about your mission statement. If it’s been a while since you’ve updated it, revisit it, decide whether it needs changes. Talk about it in a staff meeting to get input from your staff. Do you have a vision statement, goals, and/or a strategic plan? If so, revisit them as well. Spend some time talking with your AVC and your staff about where you want your unit to go over the next five or so years. Do you want it to stay the same? Refocus? Change drastically?

Look at the CAS functional area standards for your unit. CAS standards are available for most of our units. How is your unit doing with regard to these? In which areas are you strong or weak? (Contact the Director of SA Assessment if you’d like a scanned pdf of your unit’s standards; otherwise, you can purchase from the CAS website.)

Think about whether you have any specific questions for the external reviewers, e.g., are you thinking of expanding in one area and wondering where to cut back or thinking about a restructuring? Are you concerned that too much of your budget is going toward a program that serves few yet you think it is essential? Reviewers might have useful suggestions or things to think about.

Self-Study Report

This report is written by the unit’s staff prior to the reviewers’ site visit. The report will probably require a series of regular meetings with your staff and any external stakeholders (e.g., faculty advisors) to decide what the focus of your report should be and what all to include.

Ideally this is a full report but if your AVC agrees, it can be brief and primarily appendices. But you will almost certainly get more out of the program review process if you write a thorough self-study report.

Writing the report should be a useful process in itself, as you dive deep into discussions with your staff and stakeholders of your unit’s strengths and weaknesses (look at the CAS Standards) and compile data from various relevant sources (attendance figures, assessment results, satisfaction/evaluation surveys, budget). What do you find? What can you conclude from this? Where are your strengths and weaknesses? Do you have thoughts about how you might be able to improve your weaker areas, or no? This report should be useful to your unit, even without a visit (but you need to have a visit, too).

Often these reports do a deep dive into three core areas of the unit, so that is an option. Housing did this for their recent external review.

Your report will probably include both “artifacts” (assorted documents) and text. Below is a general guideline for what to include in your self-study report. Your report can certainly deviate from this, but this might be a starting point or give you ideas:

  • Introduction
      • Write about your unit and its history
      • Include your unit’s mission statement and if your unit has them, your strategic plan and vision and goals statements (and anything else similar) 
      • How is your unit’s purpose connected with the university’s mission & strategic plan? I.e., to which area(s) of the university’s mission and strategic plan does your unit contribute? 
      • Give the links to your website, the Student Affairs website, the UCI strategic plan, and any other sites that might be useful to the external reviewers
  • Programs and Services
      • How is your unit organized and what are the various staff roles? (Appendix will include a lot of the details of this, just give an overview here and refer to the appendix.)
      • Information about each of your programs, events, and services – titles, summaries, number of times per year, approximate numbers and types of attendees (demographics if available and  undergrad/grad/faculty/staff/community)
      • How does each program/event/service relate to your unit’s mission/goals (and the university’s)
  • Assessment
      • What are all your unit’s outcomes (SLOs and unit outcomes)? 
      • How do you determine/assess how well you are doing in fulfilling your own mission? This can include a wide range of information, but be sure to include your student learning outcomes assessment – what you do for assessment and what your results have been over at least the past five years. You can copy this from SALO (search on your unit and all years), and add any additional specifics that you can that you hadn’t included in SALO.
      • Include your most recent in-depth assessment reports. For most units, your in-depth assessment will have been performed the year prior to your external program review
      • Describe any changes you’ve made in programming, organization, outreach, budgeting, or anything else as a result of any of your assessment work in the past 5-10 years (this is called “closing the loop”). Be specific.
  • Financial
      • Annual budget information
      • List any grants or other financial awards received and describe for what purpose, when received, timeframe covered, dollar amount.
  • Discussion 
    • Discuss your unit’s strengths and weaknesses (yes, both), because the focus of the review process is improvement. If you know how your unit compares with a comparable unit at other universities or especially at one or more of our sister campuses, include that 
    • If you are trying to figure out how to make any sort of change or thinking about perhaps making a change (e.g., programming, organization, focus), include your thoughts on that

Artifacts (appendix) include:

  • Org chart and roster of all staff, their backgrounds/qualifications and roles (unless your unit is very large, in which case you can give the numbers of staff in each area and limit detailed information to describing your directors)
  • Information about your faculty advisors or affiliates, including off-campus affiliates if you have any 
  • Your strategic plan, if you have one
  • Your in-depth assessment report (the ones that are done every four years), and your annual assessments from SALO for the last five years or so
  • Outlines of your workshops or any regular events
  • Flyers you use to advertise your events