SACSCOC Off-site Committee’s Response

Non-Compliance

LSU provides data with respect to student achievement and identifies a list of performance benchmarks.  However, the benchmarks do not include specific goals, nor is the criteria for acceptability of intended outcomes clearly articulated. As an example, The Grad ACT requires institutions to “increase the (cohort) graduation rate and graduation productivity goals consistent with institutional peers.” While LSU does provide graduation rates and establishes data for the benchmark year, no data is available on the establishment of a peer graduation rate for analysis.  In addition, the criteria used for establishing the peers and monitoring progress towards a stated goal are absent. 

LSU does provide historical data on retention, graduation, course completion, and job placement rates and state licensing examinations.  In the case of licensure exams, LSU does compare the success of their students to state and national averages and defines the institutional goal as meeting or exceeding the minimal requirements for professional practice.

LSU A&M’s Response

The SACSCOC Off-site Committee notes the following:

LSU does provide historical data on retention, graduation, course completion, and job placement rates and state licensing examinations.  In the case of licensure exams, LSU does compare the success of their students to state and national averages and defines the institutional goal as meeting or exceeding the minimal requirements for professional practice.

The Off-Site Committee however stated that

LSU provides data with respect to student achievement and identifies a list of performance benchmarks.  However, the benchmarks do not include specific goals, nor is the criteria for acceptability of intended outcomes clearly articulated. As an example, The Grad ACT requires institutions to “increase the (cohort) graduation rate and graduation productivity goals consistent with institutional peers.”

and that

While LSU does provide graduation rates and establishes data for the benchmark year, no data is available on the establishment of a peer graduation rate for analysis.  In addition, the criteria used for establishing the peers and monitoring progress towards a stated goal are absent.

As noted by the SACSCOC Off-site Committee, LSU does have different approaches in establishing benchmarks and goals for determining performance on professional licensure exams versus for the analyses required for The GRAD Act. For the performance-based analyses of performances on licensures, the university and its academic programs use national averages to evaluate results on these tests.

However, the benchmarks on targeted student-success measures, such as retention and graduation rates, in the GRAD Act are determined through a prescribed process, established by state legislation [1], in which the institution using baseline data sets benchmarks for each targeted measure of the next six years [2]. These targets are reviewed and approved by the Board of Regents, Louisiana’s state coordinating board for higher education in the initial Performance Agreement. As a performance-based funding approach for determining autonomies in terms tuition setting and other financial processes, the GRAD Act is critically important to each institution. The establishment of the benchmarks for all targeted data takes into consideration performance levels of peer institutions but must begin from the baseline data and demonstrate improvement over the six-year period. On an annual basis, Board of Regents scores the performance levels and GRAD Act reports for each institution. The expectation is that the institution will not only have achieved the benchmark but also have evaluated their performances relative to the targeted data in the annual report. For each of the first three-years of GRAD Act reporting, LSU has exceeded the required minimal performance, scoring a 100% on the most recent evaluation [3].

Another concern raised by the off-site review is that LSU didn’t identify the criteria used for peer institution and monitoring progress toward stated goals. The peer institutions used by LSU are established through a predetermined definition of the characteristics required to be a truly comparable peer institution [4]. The LSU institutional peer group emerges from a review of all higher education institutions and then narrowing down to those institutions that have these characteristics: public universities with a land-grant mission, Carnegie Research designation as Very High Research Activity, without a medical school, and located in the Midwest or South. Using this analysis, thirteen universities are identified as the LSU peer institutions. These institutions are:

Colorado State University

Iowa State University

Mississippi State University

North Carolina State University at Raleigh

Purdue University

Texas A&M University

University of Arkansas                                                          

University of Georgia

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Maryland -- College Park

University of Nebraska at Lincoln

University of Tennessee

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

LSU’s approach to identifying national peer institutions is objective and begins without consideration to performance characteristics of specific institutions. That is, these peers are first identified and then their performance data are determined. 

Although the GRAD Act targeted measures for retention and graduation rates don’t reflect peer-institution performances, LSU does evaluate those measures against our peer institutions. This analysis is included in the annual LSU Metrics Report, submitted to the LSU System Board of Supervisors. Included in the Metrics Report is a National Benchmark Report [5]. Performance data on retention and graduation rates, as well as other measures, allows for comparisons against individual peer institutions and also against the peer averages on these measures.

LSU establishes and uses well-defined benchmarks on student success, using appropriate measures as required for the GRAD Act and the LSU Metrics Report. Performance against these benchmarks is used by the university to evaluate quality of its programs and is also reviewed by both the LSU System’s Board of Supervisors and the state’s Board of Regents.