CCG Campus Plans 2017 Updates

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GUIDELINES & GENERAL INFORMATION

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The CCG Campus Plan Updates are intended to be an opportunity for your institution to reflect on your past work and plan for next steps.  Updates are living documents rooted in your institutional mission and student body profile and reflecting the work that will most impact your goals for improved student success.  It is our intention for updates to be a part of a campus planning process that helps to identify success and challenges and communicates these to peers at institutions across the University System

For 2017, the Campus Plan Updates retain the reporting structure from the previous three years, with a few simplifications.  The 2017 update has two sections:

• an online strategy survey (login required) for institutions to indicate the strategies and activities that they have pursued, and
• a narrative section for more detailed discussion of the top priority work and progress of the past year. 

Together these elements will help to paint a comprehensive picture of the varied and productive work in place on our campuses.

Campus Plan Components

WHAT’S NEW FOR 2017?
Highlights:

• Updated strategy survey
• No more tabular form for narrative reports
• Earlier due date (August 17)
• Page limits are back (10pp.)
• Five year retrospective remarks

Updated Strategy Survey

Look for a new strategy survey that asks for more detail on the work you are doing.  The new survey reflects an interest in ability to dig deeper into the work being done on campus and identify in a more detailed manner the nature of the completion work being done.  The survey has been designed for short completion time, but will ask for more specificity in the targets of your work.  Because more than one individual on campus will potentially need to complete the survey, an institutional login and password will be distributed with instructions on completing the survey.

Narrative Report Improvements

The narrative report section is intended to answer a few specific questions about your institution’s top priority work: what are you working on? Why is it important? What activities have you undertaken? What progress are you making? And what have you learned?

Campus Plan Updates are reviews of work completed in the 2016-2017 academic year.  They are intentionally retrospective.  If your institution is changing focus or realigning priorities for the future, please report on the work completed in the current year and let us know about the changes in the Observations section.

For 2017, institutions do not need to provide their report in tabular form.  We still request that the report for each strategy detailed include:

1. A definition/general description of the strategy or activity;
2. The goal of the strategy (this can be an established CCG goal or an institutional goal);
3. A statement explaining why this strategy is high priority or impact;
4. The principal point of contact for the strategy or activity;
5. A summary of resources and activities conducted:

1. prior to the reporting year (if any) and
2. in the reporting year;

6. Measures by which you are judging the progress of the activity including:
   1. the baseline status of the metrics (defined most often as the status the year prior to initiating the strategy or activity, although a determined point in time is also possible)
   2. the interim measures (year-on-year measures), and
   3. final measures of success, the eventual goal for the strategy, if appropriate.  For this final measure, institutions are encouraged to identify the degree of success they wish to achieve for a given strategy and the time period that they feel it will take to accomplish this.  In areas where there is no “end goal,” an appropriate level of growth is a suitable proxy
7. Lessons Learned

These strategies are understood to be “works in progress” and it is anticipated that changes in predicted outcomes will occurs.  Updates should report on these changes and the reasons for revision as well as other observations on challenges or successes you have had in a “Lessons Learned” section for each strategy.

A Reminder: Demonstration of Priority or Impact

For 2017, we are again asking campuses to explicitly link the work they are highlighting in their reports to the priorities that emerge from the review of the institutional mission and student body profile.  Institutions are asked to briefly describe how successfully implementing a strategy will achieve a high priority, high impact objective highlighted in their reflection.  

High priority: a high priority strategy is one that addresses an immediate and clearly identified need on your campus, or is closely aligned with your institutional mission or student body.  High priority strategies should be those that would be first to be addressed in considerations of allocation of resources and attention on campus

High impact: a high impact strategy is one that affects (or has the demonstrated potential to affect) a large number of students, affects a more limited number of students in a critical area or has the demonstrated potential to have significant demonstrated impact on students regardless of scale.  These decisions should be aligned with the institution’s mission and its student body profile.

No Limits on Strategies; Reasonable Limits on Length

Continuing from 2016, institutions are not limited in the number of strategies they may report on, but we do ask that institutions provide sufficient reporting to give a meaningful sense of what is underway on campus while focusing on those activities that are both high impact and high priority. We encourage you to be mindful of the intent of the Updates to highlight work that you are doing that has potential to improve the capacity of campuses across the system.  Each activity or strategy should be reported separately.  Activities that fall under a common goal or functional area can be arranged together, but each discrete strategy or activity should be discussed independently where possible.

While campuses are encouraged to report on as many strategies and activities that meet the criteria of being high priority and high impact a necessary, we are encouraging limits on overall reporting.  We ask that institutions limit the length of their updates to no more than 10 pages, not counting appendices.

Appendices

Including data in appendices is recommended where the data table will lead to excessive length or complicate the report.  If tables or charts are included as an appendix and referred to in the body of the narrative, please be sure to number or otherwise mark each for easy reference.  It is not necessary to report data in the appendix that is not reported on in the main narrative report.

Deadline

Campus updates have historically been due in final form to the System Office in late fall in order to meet a reporting deadline for the governor’s office, with initial drafts due in late August.  This results in institutions having to revisit their previous year’s activities while they are in the midst of a host of new activities. 

In order to simplify this process, the deadline for reports for 2017 is August 17.  System office feedback on campus plans will be returned to institutions by mid-September, but no further action will be needed by institutions after the deadline. 

We recognize that an earlier deadline will mean that some final measures will not be available. Institutions wishing to update their reports with final data can indicate an interest in doing so in their submission. Institutions requiring more time to complete their reports should notify Jonathan Hull or their CCG liaison.

Observations

In addition to your reflection on this year’s successes and challenges, we are asking for a retrospective review of CCG over the past five years.  As the CCG initiative matures and moves into its second five years, we would like to hear from institutions on what has worked well, what has not, and how they would shift approaches to completion in the state.

REPORT OVERVIEW

PART I: CAMPUS PLAN STRATEGY SURVEY

This brief survey is an opportunity for you to identify all of the high-impact strategies you are pursuing.  This first part of the update report enables the System Office to collect aggregate information about strategies that are being used across the.  The survey is available online at http://completecollegegeorgia.org/survey2017 beginning April 21, and closing July 15.   The survey is more detailed this year in order to provide a more complete picture of work at the campus level.  You can save, exit, and return to the survey prior to reviewing and submitting your response. Each campus will have a single logon to the survey, distributed to the principal CCG contact (as identified by the institutional CCG team).

PART II: NARRATIVE OVERVIEW

The 2017 status report features three areas of focus that will be reported to the governor: an institutional profile; institutional strategies, activities, and goals; and reflections, observations and plans for next year. Please use the suggested format to complete your report.

Section 1.     Institutional Mission and Student Body Profile

Provide a brief overview of your institutional mission and student body profile.  Please briefly describe enrollment trends, demographics (for example, % Pell grant-eligible, % first-generation college students, % adult learners), and how your institutional mission influences your completion work’s key priorities. 

Section 2.     Institutional Completion Goals, High-Impact Strategies & Activities

Based on your review of data on completion indicators, your institutional mission, and the resources available, please identify and report on your institution’s high priority, high impact strategies.  The strategies and goals you select to highlight should emerge from Part I: Campus Plan Strategy Guide And Metric Survey. 

Please use the structure provided below or on this downloadable word file to complete your report. 

Section 3.    Reflections,Observations & Plans for Next Year

As Complete College Georgia finishes the fifth full year of updates, we are interested in your overall sense of where your institution has made progress, where opportunities remain, and what work has been most useful.  What strategies and activities have been most successful?  What have been least effective?  Has your institution made adjustments on completion activities over the past year? If so, please explain why?  Looking ahead, do you anticipate changes for next year’s plan? Please briefly describe the direction you think your work will be going in the coming years and why.

SUBMITTING YOUR UPDATE

Campus Plan Strategy Surveys should be completed online.  Narrative reports may be submitted here as a Microsoft Word file.  Files not submitted through the CCG website should be sent via email to CCG@usg.edu.  Questions on your update can be directed to your institution USG-CCG liaison (see below), or to Jonathan Watts Hull at jonathan.hull@usg.edu, 404-962-3129.

Submit Your Update

USG CCG COMPLETION PLAN LIAISON LIST