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Committee wants reaction to Institutional Performance Program concepts

By Michelle Brutlag Hosick

The Division I Committee on Institutional Performance, formerly the Committee on Athletics Certification, is seeking membership feedback on a new program to replace athletics certification for Division I members. The process, to be called the Institutional Performance Program, will be less of an accreditation and more of a report card on the health of a school’s athletics program.

The program is intended to provide members with a consistent and ongoing method of evaluating their athletics programs’ commitment to Division I priorities (academics, financial management, gender/diversity and student-athlete experience) and will identify both strengths and areas for improvement.

The Institutional Performance Program will focus on four main areas for review:

• Academics
• Student-athlete experience
• Fiscal management
• Gender and diversity issues

The program will replace the narrative, self-study portion of current athletics certification with a structure that catalogs various pieces of data member schools already provide in a dashboard format that can be checked annually for meeting certain benchmarks. 

The committee is looking for feedback on several aspects of the program, including how often the committee should review the data and the creation of accountability measures. The online survey instrument presents several options for members’ review under each concept.

For example, the committee would like to know if the membership prefers an annual review of the submitted information, a review every other year, something less frequent or a review of different data sets (for example academics or student-athlete experience vs. fiscal management or inclusion) at different intervals.

The committee is also interested in how the membership believes it should set accountability measures and proposes several options in that area as well. Among those options would be models that:

• Wait for several years to set benchmarks and other accountability measures.
• Establish benchmarks in some areas and phase them in over several years.
• Establish benchmarks in all areas with penalties associated with failing to meet those benchmarks.
• Confine benchmarks to only some areas.

The survey will be open for several weeks.