Drinan updates college on ABR process
Maria Costigan
Issue date: 2/4/10 Section: News
A semester into the Academic Business Review, the focus of the school-wide analysis is turning away from course and section review to look at the academic structure of the college, said President Helen Drinan Monday in an interview with The Voice.
With the majority of the scrutiny of courses finished, the next step of the ABR includes an examination of the efficiency of the structure of the school as it stands. Simmons College and its five graduate schools are made up of multiple departments. The next step of the ABR is to assess whether or not those departments would be better served and gain more visibility if they were free-standing institutions not held under a larger umbrella school, Drinan said.
"Take the Graduate School of Education which is a part of the CAS graduate programs," said Drinan. "Would the program benefit from being extracted on a stand-alone basis? We wouldn't change the curriculum [or] the faculty, but we would call it out as a separate entity."
This has the potential to bring more money to these programs through grant funding and private donors, she said.
At the same time, administrative inefficiencies are under scrutiny as part of an overhead administrative review. In this step of the ABR, the school is investing in a centralized admissions management program that will be used across all of the schools called Intelliworks.
This new program would eliminate much administrative redundancy, "and frankly, a lot of the manual labor," Drinan said.
This program is being installed now and will be running in the undergraduate college for the next recruiting cycle this summer.
Drinan said it will standardize the admissions process from an administrative and organizational point of view.
The first step of the ABR, the course and section review, is now finished. Recommendations are now in the hands of individual departments who are preparing to send their final changes to the Office of the Registrar for implementation. Changes will be in place before fall registration this spring, Drinan said.
With the majority of the scrutiny of courses finished, the next step of the ABR includes an examination of the efficiency of the structure of the school as it stands. Simmons College and its five graduate schools are made up of multiple departments. The next step of the ABR is to assess whether or not those departments would be better served and gain more visibility if they were free-standing institutions not held under a larger umbrella school, Drinan said.
"Take the Graduate School of Education which is a part of the CAS graduate programs," said Drinan. "Would the program benefit from being extracted on a stand-alone basis? We wouldn't change the curriculum [or] the faculty, but we would call it out as a separate entity."
This has the potential to bring more money to these programs through grant funding and private donors, she said.
At the same time, administrative inefficiencies are under scrutiny as part of an overhead administrative review. In this step of the ABR, the school is investing in a centralized admissions management program that will be used across all of the schools called Intelliworks.
This new program would eliminate much administrative redundancy, "and frankly, a lot of the manual labor," Drinan said.
This program is being installed now and will be running in the undergraduate college for the next recruiting cycle this summer.
Drinan said it will standardize the admissions process from an administrative and organizational point of view.
The first step of the ABR, the course and section review, is now finished. Recommendations are now in the hands of individual departments who are preparing to send their final changes to the Office of the Registrar for implementation. Changes will be in place before fall registration this spring, Drinan said.
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