UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As the Academic Portfolio and Program Review (APPR) enters its second phase, Penn State leaders have shared a spring update on the status of the effort, and have announced a virtual insight session on March 20 to provide more details and answer community questions.
What is the APPR?
The APPR, which began in 2024, is a multi-year effort to evaluate Penn State’s current academic offerings and align them with student needs and workforce demands; support strong alignment with Penn State’s mission and goals; and allow for strategic investment in high-growth programs. It also seeks to set Penn State on a path for a long-term, data-informed portfolio and program review cycle. Penn State will join many other institutions nationwide that have such processes in place.
“The APPR is fundamental to our commitment to student success, and to delivering world-class, lifelong value in return for the investment our students and their families make in Penn State,” said Executive Vice President and Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos. “This is a critical priority for our leadership team, as I know it is for our academic community. We are committed to engagement with our faculty and academic leaders, and to shared governance, throughout.”
Sotiropoulos said the APPR will prepare Penn State to be nimble in its program offerings and continue to invest in programs that will help students and faculty to thrive, even as the University’s primary sources of funding for academic instruction — tuition and state appropriations — are not keeping up with rising costs.
“It is a fact that the higher education landscape is changing, and we must meet the moment. Penn State is not immune to the forces affecting higher education. Changing demographics; enrollment declines; shifting student demand and workforce needs; stagnant state funding; and rising costs are all prompting difficult decisions at institutions nationwide,” he said. “The good news is that Penn State is well positioned among its peers. We remain among the world’s elite public research universities. This is no accident, but a testament to the value our students and alumni see in the outstanding quality of our faculty and in the degrees we offer. To maintain our strong footing long into the future, we must be strategic with our resources and we must move with purpose.”
Unit-level review and recommendation phase underway
Beginning this spring, the APPR has moved into its second phase: the unit-level review and recommendation phase. Informed by baseline data gathered during the APPR’s first phase, Penn State’s deans and chancellors have assembled expert teams drawn from their own colleges and campuses — each including faculty representatives — to conduct a data-informed, unit-level review of bachelor’s and associate degree programs across the University, and to make preliminary program recommendations.
Unit teams are using Hanover workforce data collected during the first phase of the APPR as a baseline, combined with institutional data such as average enrollment, student credit hours, faculty count and degrees awarded, among others. Unit teams are consulting with the Office of Planning, Assessment and Institutional Research to work through unit-specific questions related to data and other factors.
LEARN MORE: Additional information about the current phase, next steps, and frequently asked questions is available on the APPR website. This space will be regularly updated as work continues.
Sotiropoulos underscored the critical role unit leaders and faculty who are closest to the work are playing in building preliminary program recommendations.
“The teams who are engaged in this work, led by our deans and chancellors, are the disciplinary experts and are best positioned to make recommendations,” he said. “Though I will make the final decisions after thorough review, my team and I are relying on the guidance from our experts. My intention is to make data-informed decisions that serve the best interests of our students, and that cannot be achieved without input from the community members who live our academic and research missions every day.”
Community review and input
Sotiropoulos said initial recommendations from units will be relayed to his team by the end of March. Following thorough review, he said, program recommendations will be shared publicly for community input before any program decisions are made.
Additional information about the community input phase, and a look forward to next steps through the summer and into fall, will be shared during the March 20 insight session.
“I am grateful to our unit leaders and review teams for their ongoing and dedicated work this spring, and to the nearly 100 faculty, staff and administrators who were involved in the first phase of the APPR,” Sotiropoulos said. “Their efforts, and continued input from our community in the coming months, will help to position our students, our faculty and staff, and Penn State, for long-term success.”
Virtual insight session set for March 20
Penn State leaders will hold a virtual insight session to share updates on the second phase of the APPR, from noon to 1 p.m. on Friday, March 20. The livestream will be available to all faculty, staff and students.
WATCH LIVE: A link to the live stream will be available on the APPR website in the days before the event. A recording of the session will be shared on the APPR website for later viewing.
The insight session will be co-led by Kathy Bieschke, senior vice provost; Renata Engel, vice president for Commonwealth Campuses and executive chancellor; and Lance Kennedy-Phillips, vice provost for planning, assessment and institutional research. The team will provide updates on where the APPR process stands; share and walk through the underlying program-level data, analytical framework and methodology that were used as a starting point for this spring’s unit-level reviews; share updates about the forthcoming community review and input phase; review the timeline; and answer community questions.
Future insight sessions will provide updates on the current review cycle, but also will be focused on broader processes for establishing a repeatable student-centered cycle for program reviews.