Second Cycle

The second cycle of APR will take place starting in the spring of the 2025-26 academic year and conclude in the fall of the 2026-27 academic year. This cycle will utilize the flexibility of APR to focus solely on gathering retention context and information from the programs and colleges/schools. This process will provide critical insight across every UG program which will be shared and analyzed in order to more efficiently direct efforts and initiatives surrounding retention.

Focus Points:

Identifying the challenges with retention including timing, most affected populations and potential roadblock courses
Identifying initiatives in place at the program and college/school level to share effective practices
Identifying the most critical centralized support partners

As we approached the second cycle, the most important question was how to keep the momentum while acknowledging all of the current work being done.
The success of Annual Program Review is based upon the foundational goal to be flexible and relevant. After a discussion with the Deans, it was suggested that the focus should be on retention to collect information from all UG programs as well as their schools and colleges. This important context information can be paired with the work of the Retention Partners Group in order to align resources and initiatives as well as share effective practices. This collection effort stemmed from the first cycle in which retention was a point of emphasis, but not at this level and with only 1/3 of the UG programs. IRAA took the advice and then created a new survey instrument that was finalized with the Provost and the Deans.

All UG programs will be asked to complete the short Qualtrics survey to discuss things like the timing of when students leave, what populations of students are affected, initiatives within the college as well as those that the University could focus on to help individual programs. This level of study surrounding retention has never been done before, and we hope that it will help the colleges/schools as well as the Provost’s Office to more efficiently address how we keep students at the University.

Program Reports:

Program representatives will utilize the tactical dashboard retention data to complete a program report that will provide context to be shared with college/school leadership.

College Reports:

College representatives and leadership will utilize an aggregated college level report along with the context and information provided within the program reports to create a college level report retention strengths and weaknesses.

The colleges and schools will meet with the Provost and develop an action plan for the next year based on the college report and the meetings.

University Report:

IRAA and the APR Oversight Committee will review the college level reports in order to develop a university report with aggregated trends about retention to be shared with the Provost and the Retention Partners Group.

Second Cycle Timeline

Program Reports: June 12 – July 14
College/School Reports: July 28 – September 8
College/School Meetings: September 15 – October 20
University Report: December – January

Resources: