October 31, 2025

Boo!

Yes, it’s Halloween. Yes, it’s time to wear our costumes. Yes, it’s time to honor our loved ones through El Dia de los Muertos…if you subscribe to that cultural tradition.

It’s also time to finish our accreditation and strategic planning series. If you didn’t read last week’s Friday Letter, I attached it to this email. Please read it before continuing with this letter. It’s required. If you’ve already read it, please continue.

Accreditation Recommendations

In 2020, we received three recommendations from NWCCU about how we could better demonstrate mission fulfillment. Let’s take a moment to remember our mission:

We are the community’s college. We deliver accessible, equitable, and superior educational experiences to inspire every person to achieve their educational and career goals.

The following sections outline the three recommendations and the steps we took to improve. The Board of Trustees is hearing about each of these over the course of their meetings this year. For a deeper dive, I invite you to read the Trustee packets, starting with last month.

1. Improving Institutional Effectiveness.

   Use an ongoing and systematic evaluation and planning process to inform decision making and resource allocation, toward improving institutional effectiveness and achieving mission fulfillment.

   We interpreted this to mean a “structure” by which we work through our initiatives leading us to improve student success. We have addressed this recommendation by taking these steps:

   • Each fall, the Trustees, Executive Team, and Student Success Council look at data from last year’s efforts as well as overall mission metrics. These groups suggest ideas to college leadership about new initiatives to adopt, sunsetting or operationalizing initiatives, or abandoning initiatives. It’s all about improving student success.

   • In the Winter, the Executive Team reviews the suggestions and adopts a set of initiatives that are then evaluated to determine what resources they might need. If needed, this goes to Budget Council for review.

   • In the spring, we announce the initiatives and start work over the summer.

   What have been some of those initiatives over the last seven years?

   • Cascadia Scholars

   • Guided Pathways

   • Intrusive Advising

   • Bringing up EAB Navigate

   • Redmond Center

   • Technology Accessibility

   • STEM Pathways with UWB (see the Improvement Moment in the next section)

   • AIIS Program

2. Student Learning

   Engage in an effective system of assessment to evaluate the quality of learning in its programs. These assessment efforts should be used to inform academic and learning support-planning and practices to continuously improve student learning outcomes.

   This work has primarily involved faculty and academic leadership. Based on our Guided Pathways Areas of Interests, the faculty now review each area through systematic assessment, determine if the program is meeting its intended outcome, and then suggest improvement if it does not. Similarly, there is an assessment of our four college-wide learning outcomes that apply to all Areas of Interest.

   Tori Saneda and Kristina Young have provided us with periodic overviews of this progress over the last few years and are to be commended for their commitment to the leadership of this process. They will present a two-part series to the Board of Trustees on the details of this work in Winter and Spring. I’ll highlight those in future Friday Letters.

3. Student Achievement

   Establish and share widely a set of indicators for student achievement that are disaggregated and compared to regional and national peer institutions in a manner that identifies and removes barriers to academic excellence and success (equity gaps), and promotes student achievement.

   We now do this systematically as part of our data evaluation. October’s Board of Trustees meeting reviewed the process with examples. (You can refer back to the Board packet if you are looking for details.) Our overall college (or mission) metrics are now compared to state and national markers. You’ve hopefully read in the past about how well we do on our Guided Pathways metrics as compared to other colleges. That’s just one example of how we use peer data to determine where we stand and if we need improvement. That being said, we are always leaning into continuous improvement and challenging ourselves to review paradigms and expectations to improve student success.

   When looked at holistically, we have a very functional system of reviewing our work and implementing improvements that help us meet our mission. I hope the accreditors agree. More than likely, we will receive more recommendations when they visit in April 2027. That’s ok. It’s their job to look at our work from an outside lens and offer us suggestions for becoming an even better college.

Improvement Moment

This is a new section that will appear periodically throughout the next two years to articulate details about some of our initiatives as described above.

The Stem Transfer Partnership (STP), a collaboration between Cascadia and UW, seeks to improve STEM student transfers to the UWB through outreach, collaborative curriculum building, advising connections, and faculty visits and tours.

Our partnership began with engineering and now includes biology, chemistry, and physics. We identified major courses to track STEM student cohorts and completed a STEM student survey to surface their transfer process perceptions and to identify success markers that help students transfer.

This initiative is still active and on-going. STP will continue the UW-Cascadia convenings, expand faculty and student involvement, and streamline data-sharing between the UW and Cascadia.

Questions? Contact Kristina Young. 😄

Shoutouts

Shoutouts can be sent to FLShoutout@cascadia.edu.

Have a great weekend. Stay healthy!