Dear Grad College Staff,
It is my pleasure to announce a new unit in the Graduate College that will focus on graduate data, analytics and research. I have formed a first-class team of in-house experts to develop this important initiative, comprised of Dianne Horgan as lead, with colleagues Teresa Embry and Tom Rhodes.
As part of our overall trajectory towards a more closely monitored, managed and paperless set of processes enabling graduate education, we have grown the role of our IT and web services, the online grad application and program review services, and most recently our GradPath degree progress system that is integrated into UAccess and will go live in a few months. We area key central service unit for the campus, and one of our most important roles is to provide useful tools and information to graduate programs and administration across campus. Our new systems, in combination with the capabilities of the campus UAccess system, put us among the leading graduate schools in the nation in terms of our ability to track, analyze and manage the graduate enterprise. To truly capitalize on our new capability, we must now turn this information into useful analysis and knowledge.
We need to provide top-notch knowledge and decision-support tools to campus and ourselves across topics such as admissions yields, attrition and completion, time to degree, student funding and debt, program quality and many more. We also need easily accessible and packaged data for grant submissions, academic program reviews, college deans' offices, and central graduate program oversight at the University level. Also, we need to integrate national and international data and knowledge into our decision-making, and contribute what we learn to the broader graduate education community. Thegoal of this unit is to fulfill these needs. It is a challenging task, but I know we can succeed and, in doing so, advance the UA's graduate enterprise as a leading model of how to achieve excellence in graduate education administration.
In support of these changes, all three individuals will be changing and adapting their duties: Dianne is completing the process of rearranging her oversight roles to accommodate this activity; Teresa will take advantage of her expertise across UAccess, graduate programs and processes, and higher education and shift to the new unit; and, Tom will be shifting his responsibilities to focus explicitly on the new initiative and to offload some of the considerable external demands on his time for survey responses.In addition, following her successful term in an interim capacity, Rhea Gowin has been asked to take on the permanent supervisory role of the Graduate Admissions area.
I am very excited about the possibilities for this new unit and I want to thank our Graduate College management team for their insights and help in shaping this and related recent initiatives that have truly reshaped our college and its role. Please congratulate Dianne, Tom, Teresa, and Rhea on their new adventures.
Andrew
Andrew C. Comrie, Ph.D.
Dean of the Graduate College
Associate Vice President for Research