Page 12 - Southern PPI Final Report-5 16 19

In April 2018, Southern University and A&M College, under the leadership of President Belton
and Executive Vice President and Provost Ammons, undertook the challenge of reviewing
academic programs at the Baton Rouge campus. Along with a review of the academic
programs, a corresponding assessment was also performed on all administrative units in
support of the University’s mission. The following report represents the output of this process.
Hopefully, it will provide a sense of the directions that the University can take in the future
with the goal of enhancing our academic programs and creating a sustainable financial
environment that will enable Southern University to flourish.

The University launched two taskforces to conduct the Program Prioritization Initiative
(PPI) reviews. The two groups were comprised of key stakeholders from the academic and
administrative areas, with appropriate representation from the faculty senate. These groups
worked throughout the year under the guidance of an external consultant team to complete the
tasks related to the review. There were four phases involved in the review: 1) Phase One –
launch and creation of the taskforces, 2) Development of review criteria, 3) Development of
assessment rubrics, and 4) Results.

Methodology
The PPI used a widely accepted methodology for program reviews that was created by
Dr. Robert Dickeson called Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services. Our methodology
heavily utilized reviews by the taskforces which resulted in the development of three essential
surveys that were administered campus wide: 1) A general administrative survey to assess the
institutional administrative climate, 2) The academic program survey that was administered to
all program chairs, and 3) An administrative survey administered to all administrative program
heads. A key part of the academic survey, in addition to the assessment of program chairs, was
the accumulation of institutional data related to academic and administrative program
performance. This body of information is critical because it represents the objective data related
to academic performance that allows for the independent assessment of major indicators by use
of a variety of commonly used metrics. Along with the internally generated data, this process
also benefited from several external reports that added weight to our process by giving us
additional lenses through which to review our programs. The external sources were the
comprehensive 2017 Gallop Report commissioned by the Louisiana Board of Regents, The
Louisiana Workforce Commission Report, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Career
Outlook data.

Page 12 of 202