Academic Program Review
Trinity Western University seeks to prepare students for lives of significance and meaning.
Through integrating faith and learning within a supportive Christian community, Trinity Western is advancing innovative ways to deliver education that prepares graduates with the knowledge, character, and creativity to make a lasting impact in the world.
It is in this spirit that TWU continually reviews its curricular, co-curricular, and non-curricular programs and offerings. We regularly assess the academic quality, student demand, and financial health of all our programs.
TWU Fact Book
Institutional assessment at Trinity Western relies on data and statistics about the university’s historic and current admissions, enrolment, graduation trends, and overall financial health. Accordingly, TWU produces an essential collection of data that will be made available to everyone on an annual basis.
Here is the first edition of TWU’s Fact Book:
Striving for excellence
Institutional assessment is key to improving the overall quality of our education. Assessment provides the opportunity to identify programs that demand greater investment and support. Analysis may also uncover the need for substantial revision, re-evaluation, or the closure of programs.
Healthy universities maintain an ability to improve programs that are essential to their mission while building the capacity to meet the changing needs of their students and the demands of the market. Like other higher educational institutions, Trinity Western engages in program review as a normal part of our university’s assurance of continued institutional excellence, responsible stewardship, and sustainable growth.
Process for program review
Trinity Western engages annually in robust and wide-ranging institutional assessment in addition to regular in-depth program reviews every five years. This process is a collaborative effort involving consultation with students, faculty, academic deans, University leadership and industry-leading experts. Through this process, TWU identifies areas of excellence, opportunities for program development, and programs that will be challenging to sustain in their current form, sometimes leading to closure.
Examples of reasons for program closure or transformation include:
- Low program enrolment resulting in courses consistently not meeting the required minimum number of students to run classes
- Historic trends showing diminishing numbers of students persisting to graduation
- High program costs relative to program revenue
Fostering high-quality education
At Trinity Western, the drive to prioritize student learning has led us to foster a culture of continuous improvement, exercise financial discipline, and adjust and develop programs to meet the changing needs of current and future students.
In addition to program reviews and closures, recommended changes to many of our programs will be implemented in order to strengthen our degree offerings. Efforts will be taken to monitor class sizes and, in some cases, changes may require a shift in curricular offerings within a discipline.
Strategic planning at TWU
Trinity Western launched a university-wide strategic planning process in January 2022. TWU has an extraordinary mission and a new vision. As a university community, we embrace the opportunity to build a plan that helps us accomplish all that our vision calls us to be and to serve students for generations to come.