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California State University, Long Beach
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Organizing for Effectiveness (B.1)

The last WASC visiting team praised our shared decision-making and our high level of collegiality, but they raised questions about the effectiveness of the decentralized nature of our organizational structure. CSULB faces several key organizational issues at this moment in its history. 

  1. Making effective decisions at the university, division and unit levels, with particular attention to planning for anticipated growth and pervasive technology,
  2. Communicating effectively in a large, complex environment,
  3. Implementing our new program review process in order to improve student retention, graduation, and learning outcomes assessment.

In this document:

  1. Planning and Decision-making

    Recent organizational changes have included a reorganization of responsibilities within the Division of Academic Affairs as well as the reconfiguration of the Academic Senate and its committee structure. Our Resource Planning Process is a long-standing cross-divisional effort that has been quite successful over its seventeen-year history; in fact, it is widely admired and imitated on other CSU campuses. In the late 1990s the campus developed a strategic planning, goal-setting process as a way to link budgeting to university priorities. These two annual processes work in concert and have been refined over the years. In our Capacity and Preparatory Review, we will describe each of these planning efforts as well as analyze their effectiveness over the course of the recent budget downturn and recovery. In particular, we will describe the approach we used to protect instruction and minimize the impact of cuts, as well as the recovery plan we implemented in 2004. (Criteria 3.5, 3.8, 3.11, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3)

    The campus is reformulating its mission statement. Although each division within the university has revisited its own mission or vision in the last few years, the University’s mission statement has not been revised for some time, and an alignment of mission and vision is long overdue. A consultative process, involving the Academic Senate as well as representatives of each of the four divisions of the University, will develop a concise statement that will encompass the university’s values, mission, vision, and envisioned future. The draft mission statement will be shared with key campus constituencies for additional input and will then be presented to the Academic Senate in late Fall 2006. The final version of the revised mission statement, which will inform and align our planning processes, will be presented to the President by the end of the Fall 2006 semester.

    1. An important area of university planning is enrollment management and campus growth. With strong demand for places in the freshman class, as well as a desire to expand select graduate offerings, the campus must manage its growth in a way that protects both quality and diversity. Skyrocketing demand at the freshman level stimulated cross-divisional enrollment planning and the creation of the current campus impaction plan, which at­tempts to manage enrollment growth while preserving campus diversity. In 2003-2004, a major cross-divisional planning effort focused on the question of whether to increase the maximum size of the campus, and how such an increase might be accomplished while preserving quality and protecting the physical environment. In the budget downturn, we were able to use the enrollment management plan to successfully contain growth. Now, however, as we recover from the budget crisis and face pressure from the state to increase the number of students being served, campus growth has again emerged as a major planning issue. Growth provides us with a source of new operating revenue and also provides access to capital funds to remodel or replace aging buildings. Challenges will come from potential mismatches between demand (especially strong at the freshman level) and capacity to absorb students (greater at the upper division and graduate levels) as well as the fact that some of our most popular programs have already placed limits on the number of students they accept. (Criteria 4.1, 4.2, 4.3)
    2. Another important planning area is technology, both the infrastructure itself as well as how technology is used to facilitate communication and student success.
      • Our technology infrastructure continues to increase in importance, but the campus also faces increasing challenges in securing information, maintaining accessibility, and coordinating activities across divisions. As our reliance on computer technology has increased, critical issues have emerged that require a coordinated university-wide response, as well as policy development. These include information and network security, web accessibility, user training and usability, and the need to continually upgrade and improve (and pay for) our major systems (PeopleSoft as well as our learning management system). (Criterion 3.7)
      • During the past several years, the campus has implemented PeopleSoft technology for student registration, enrollment, and other student services. An automated degree audit than can be run by both students and advisors to assess outstanding degree requirements became operational in spring 2005. However, the audit is a complex document, and there have been difficulties in accurately including community college transfer credits. There have also been challenges in training academic advisors to use the product, and it is uncertain how widely it is used by students on a self-help basis. On a campus of our size, use of technology for advising and student support is a necessary and critical strategy and we need to learn to exploit our technological resources as effectively as possible. (Criteria 2.13, 3.7)

  2. Communication

    3. In an organization as complexly interrelated as California State University, Long Beach, an infrastructure for creating reliable information and for effective communication of that information is crucial so that the members of the community will be able to understand and contribute to the University’s goals and participate fully in the life and the opportunities of the University. Since 2002 important university information has been converted to electronic format and more and more communication is conducted via email. Likewise, the web has assumed ever-increasing importance in the lives of our students, faculty, and staff. Efforts have also been made to improve our print communications (for example, a major project to rewrite and reorganize the Catalog for usability is on-going). Despite technological changes and interfaces, however, communication involves human beings. The challenges for the University include reducing barriers to communication, supplying needed information accurately and in a timely fashion (and in ways that allow the consumer to recognize what is important in the barrage of messages), and enhancing human interactions. We must also ensure that faculty, staff and students have the information they need to make informed decisions and to be effective members of the university community. Finally,  we must ensure that we communicate effectively with our neighbors as we revise our Campus Master Plan in preparation for enrollment growth. (Criteria 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 2.12, 2.13, 2.14, 3.8, 3.11, 4.1, 4.5, 4.8)

  3. Program Review and Assessment

    4. In 2002, the Commission’s Action Letter noted that CSULB had not developed “data [on student learning] into systematic evidence to be aligned with questions of effectiveness, nor has it developed a framework for raising such questions.” The letter further noted that areas related to planning, programming, and assessment were not “clearly vested in specific structures or individuals, resulting in disjunctures in institutional governance and evaluation.” In response to these concerns and ongoing challenges regarding integrating program review and assessment, the Academic Senate worked with the Division of Academic Affairs to completely overhaul program review policy and practices, and to establish clear guidelines for program assessment for all programs, including off-site and distance-education programs. Our present challenge is to implement this new process effectively and use it to improve program quality and student success. (Criteria 2.7, 4.4, 4.7)

Organizational Research Question for the Capacity Review

We propose to study our communication organization in our Capacity Review, focusing on the processes and organizational structures that underlie our capacity to be effective.

  1. What changes have occurred in decision making and communication processes on major issues such as enrollment growth and technology as a result of administrative and Academic Senate organizational changes? How have these changes impacted the effectiveness of our decision making?

Organizational Research Questions for the Effectiveness Review

Following are the questions we propose to study in our Effectiveness Review. With each of these questions, our focus will be upon examining the ways in which our activities contribute to our efforts to “graduate students with highly valued degrees,” by which we mean ensuring the quality of the learning attained and the degree awarded, and fostering student retention and graduation.

  1. How accessible, available and accurate are our print and electronic information sources and how successful have we been in sharing this information with both on- and off-campus constituencies to foster decision making, further community relations, and facilitate student success?
  2. How has the new Program Review and Assessment Policy furthered the assessment of student learning outcomes across the curriculum and in General Education? How has the new Program Review and Assessment Policy supported our efforts to graduate students with highly valued degrees?

Expected outcomes

As a result of examining these issues, we expect to attain several results. First, we expect to assess our communication practices and understand how to improve communication. Second, we expect to assess our decision making practices and understand how to improve those practices, particularly for planning enrollment growth and technology. Third, we expect to assess our new Program Review process and understand better how to use it to drive the student learning outcomes assessment process.