by Deborah Taub, Sharon A. Aiken-Wisniewski, & Rich Whitney
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here are many possible sources for program ideas in student affairs. Sometimes, the idea for a program comes from an external audience or stakeholder. For example, the parents’ council may suggest implementing a program to help support students’ transition to college. Program ideas also can come from upper administration or students. National data or research might point out the existence of a problem such as food insecurity that could inspire a program.
The institutional mission also may be the basis for programming. Many campus mission statements refer to creating leaders or global citizens. They may emphasize service to others and support the creation of service-learning programs and alternative break service trips. Grounding programming in the institutional mission creates buy-in on the part of stakeholders and increases the likelihood of the program being effective for students. However, it also is true that institutional mission may mitigate against the development of a program. For example, professionals at faith-based institutions may find that programs around sexual health and birth control do not fit with the mission or culture of the campus.
Still, even if a program may sound like a good idea and may be rooted in the campus mission, there remains the question if it is needed and, if so, why. To answer this question, professionals should consider conducting a needs assessment, one of the most vital parts of a successful program development model.
Student affairs professionals often implement programs based on what they have learned from colleagues, what they have read, or the institutional mission, without determining if the program is needed (Upcraft & Schuh, 1996). Barr and Cuyjet (1991) recommend that the first step in program development should be assessment, including an assessment of student needs. Needs are often talked about in terms of the discrepancy between the current state and the desired state (Lee et al., 2007). According to Upcraft and Schuh (1996), a needs assessment “is the process of determining the presence or absence of the factors and conditions, resources, services, and learning opportunities that students need in order to meet their educational goals and objectives within the context of an institution’s mission” (p. 128).
Kuh (1982) stresses that it is important to be mindful of the difference between student needs and student wants. Students may want a lazy river; what they need is a facility that supports fitness. This makes a well-designed needs assessment particularly important. In fact, the larger the program, the more you should undertake a needs assessment. You certainly do not want to commit a significant amount of budget and staff time to the creation and implementation of a large program that is not needed. Conversely, for a very small program activity such as a workshop, you likely will not venture deeply into needs assessment. It is important to match your needs assessment to the scale of your program.
There are a number of ways to collect the data necessary to make a decision. While most are familiar with strategies such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups, it is important to consider the effort that they may require. Campuses may suffer from survey fatigue. Interviews and focus groups may require complicated logistics as well as time and money that aren’t available. What many professionals may not understand, though, is that the information required to determine if a program is needed may already exist on your campus. Therefore, an excellent place to begin your needs assessment is determining data that are already available to you and examining those data.
If available, a student affairs assessment office (or staff member) can be an excellent place to begin your search. The student affairs assessment office may create, administer, and analyze results of a variety of assessments on campus. In addition, student affairs assessment will likely be aware of the variety of data that exists across campus, where it is, and how to access it. Finally, student affairs assessment can provide assistance in developing your needs assessment and might even perform the needs assessment for you.
The office of institutional research (IR) can be the source of a wealth of data that may assist you in determining whether a program is warranted. IR offices collect, analyze, and report institutional data. They also typically house data and reports from national studies in which your institution participates. Among the on-campus data that might typically be obtained from IR are data related to admissions, student credit hours, head count, and retention rates. IR should have several years of such data, allowing you to track trends and identify changes in your student body. For example, a notable increase in the number of first-generation students could suggest the development of a program to address first-generation students specifically, such as transition programs that impart “college knowledge” or a first-gen living-learning community. Lower retention rates among specific groups of students could suggest targeting those groups with retention programming, such as intrusive advising, supplemental instruction, or mentoring.
This needs assessment process can also be used to determine if the need no longer exists for a program or if the program is no longer being effective in meeting the original goal. You likely are all too familiar with programs that seem outdated or unnecessary but continue because “it’s always been that way.”
There are a number of national studies in which your institution might participate. For example, the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI, n.d.) at the University of California, Los Angeles, administers a number of national surveys in which your institution might participate; among them are the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey, Your First College Year, and the College Senior Survey. The annual CIRP Freshman Survey has been administered nationally for over 50 years. Typically, the survey is conducted at the time of college entry (e.g., during orientation). It provides information about the incoming class, including their expectations for college; their high school experiences and behaviors; their perceptions of their knowledge, skills, and abilities; and their college admissions decisions and reasons for attending college. The Freshman Survey provides your institution’s results and the aggregated results of comparison institutions. From this survey you can, for instance, gain insight into what your incoming students view as areas of weakness, suggesting the development of academic support programs in those areas, or what their level of interest is in various opportunities such as study abroad or community service.
HERI also conducts other similar surveys, including Your First College Year (YFCY) and the College Senior Survey. YFCY is similar to the Freshman Survey and can be used as a follow-up. YFCY collects data at the end of students’ first year of college and is focused on students’ development during the first college year. Questions include those about activities that students participated in, how they spent their time, satisfaction with elements of the college experience, and use of services. From YFCY you can learn how difficult your first-year students found it to manage their time effectively or to develop close friendships. Such information could indicate the need for programs around time management or additional community-building programs.
The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE; nsse.indiana.edu) collects information from participating four-year institutions for first-year and senior students. The NSSE gathers information on students’ participation in educationally purposeful activities and high-impact practices (HIPs; Kuh, 2008), learning communities, service learning, research with a faculty member, study abroad, internships, and culminating experiences (NSSE, 2013). Perhaps your institution’s NSSE results indicate that your first-generation students are less likely to participate in HIPs. You may want to explore this finding further in additional needs assessments to determine what the reasons are for lower participation by first-generation students. There is a similar survey for two-year institutions, the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE; ccsse.org), which collects information about community college students’ college experiences.
The Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL; leadershipstudy.net) collects data related to students’ college experiences and educational and leadership outcomes. Among the college experiences explored by the MSL are mentoring, involvement in campus organizations, leadership development experiences, and academic-based experiences such as study abroad and first-year seminars. From the MSL you might learn that certain groups of students are much less likely to report being mentored or participating in leadership development. Such a finding could indicate a need to target further needs assessment in this area with these groups of students to explore the barriers they might be encountering.
Grounding programming in the institutional mission creates buy-in on the part of stakeholders and increases the likelihood of the program being effective for students.
Residence life departments often participate in annual or semi-annual benchmarking to compare their performance to those of peer institutions (or aspirational peers). For example, the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International administers the Campus Housing Index, which collects data annually on a variety of topics including residential programming, staffing, policies, facilities, and budget. Your campus’s responses can be compared to those of other institutions. Residence life also may collect data in a variety of areas including resident satisfaction, resident assistant performance, occupancy, damages, conduct incidents, and programs.
Many other services and facilities on campus, such as the campus recreation center, health services, counseling services, career services, student union, and tutoring, may also collect data. Such data should provide information on the number of students who use various services or facilities and the pattern of usage (time of day, time of the semester, etc.) as well as peak usage times. Demand demonstrated by utilization data can confirm the need for expanded facilities and/or operating hours and additional program offerings.
This needs assessment process can also be used to determine if the need no longer exists for a program or if the program is no longer being effective in meeting the original goal. You likely are all too familiar with programs that seem outdated or unnecessary but continue because “it’s always been that way.” This mindset can have a negative impact because programs can consume large amounts of resources, including budget and staff time. If a program is no longer needed, those resources could be redirected more beneficially to programs that are needed, whether existing or new.
To begin, why do you think this program might not be needed? Declining or consistently low participation could be one indicator. Duplication of another similar program on campus could be another indicator. Information from program participants’ evaluations (if they exist) may provide indications that the program is missing the mark or outdated. If you have inherited a number of programs with your new position, you could examine information of this kind to get a sense of which programs you might “go out of business” on.
For example, one of the authors once worked in a campus career center. The center had a program on the transition from student to professional that staff were very proud of and very invested in. Unfortunately, when the program was offered, attendance was sparse to nonexistent. Staff tried taking the workshop “on the road” to various academic buildings and residence halls. Attendance did not improve. Staff were frustrated because they liked the workshop and thought that the content was valuable; however, the program simply failed to draw students. Before we “went out of business” on the workshop, we recorded it so that it could be accessed online. Then we took it out of our program rotation so that we could use our resources to offer programs for which students perceived more of a need.
You may want to do a more extensive needs assessment that goes beyond these easy indicators. This may be particularly indicated if the program in question has deep roots in campus history or tradition or has been championed by influential individuals on campus. The “do we still need this?” needs assessment could employ the same types of approaches as those you would use in considering a new program.
Consider the hypothetical example of Mountaintop State University (MSU). This institution is a public comprehensive university located in the mountains of a largely rural western state. It enrolls approximately 12,000 students, the majority of whom are in-state students. On her way into the university one morning, the president of the university, Margaret Jackson, heard a story on NPR about food insecurity among college students. Jackson wondered whether food insecurity was a problem at MSU. She reached out to her vice president for student affairs, Anton Bruce, to see if he had any university-specific data on food insecurity. Bruce formed a small committee to look into the issue and make recommendations; he asked Brooke Turner, director of the campus union, to lead the committee. Through further reading, Turner and the committee learned more about the impact of hunger and food insecurity on students’ success. Based on her interactions with MSU students, Turner suspected that food insecurity might be a problem on their campus; the committee’s first challenge was how to determine its extent and whether there was a need to address it.
Because the needs assessment would ultimately determine whether there was a need for a campus food pantry (a very large program), the committee elected to conduct a rather extensive needs assessment. An examination of existing documents and reports revealed little helpful information beyond the number of Pell-eligible students enrolled at MSU. Information from the College & University Food Bank Alliance (CUFBA; cufba.org) led the committee to examples of existing assessments of food insecurity and hunger. The committee decided to conduct a large-scale survey, administered electronically, adapting these existing instruments. Doing the survey electronically meant that the data would be easily compiled, analyzed, and turned into helpful tables and graphs.
In addition, they decided to conduct focus groups with a number of different subpopulations of students, including students living off campus, students living in on-campus apartments, Pell-eligible students, and graduate students. Information from CUFBA was helpful in determining groupings of students to invite to focus groups. Given the diversity of the groups, the committee decided to schedule the focus groups on several different days and at several different times of day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and to serve a meal at each focus group. They worked with the director of student affairs assessment (SAA) to write the focus group protocol, and SAA staff conducted the focus groups and transcribed each of them. Email invitations were sent to students who registered via a Google Form.
As the example of food insecurity at MSU points out, the program definition stage is important for making decisions for your community. This stage requires analysis of data on many levels to determine if a program is needed and contributes to the mission of the organization. This information not only establishes need but also offers context to establish goals, objectives, and outcomes for the program.
Identifying why a campus should or should not develop a program is really about the definition stage of the program development model and looking at the true need for a campus program. Many things happen on a campus and within students’ lives. There are many events, concerns, and missions that could be attended to on the campus. The examination of why we look at the different ways to make an intervention or create a program is important. This question must be answered prior to spending time, resources, and energy on nonrelevant issues.
Deborah J. Taub is professor and chair of the student affairs administration department at Binghamton University in New York. Sharon A. Aiken-Wisniewski is a clinical professor and director for the higher education program at The University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Rich Whitney is an associate professor and program director in organizational leadership at the University of La Verne in California.
