Much like an annual checkup at your doctor's, Texas Tech is receiving its decennial checkup from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
A representative for the association will be visiting the Texas Tech campus in late February to assess Tech's Quality Enhancement Plan - in other words, to assess the quality of the education that students at Tech receive.
In an interview with Texas Tech Public Radio Managing Director Robert Giovannetti, Nellis said the visit and subsequent impression that Tech's campus leaves is crucial for many aspects of student life.
"To be reaffirmed is absolutely essential to getting federal grants, to having federal support for our students," Nellis said. "It’s an important part of our overall quality as an institution and helps move us forward."
The university's de facto report card, the association's review happens once every ten years, and has been prepped for by university officials and administrators for since late 2012.
The campus visit is just one step in the "reaffirmation process," Nellis said, and an important one.
"This is one part of a series of steps SACS takes in what they call the ‘reaffirmation process,’ then the on-site team comes and assesses what we call the QEP, or the quality enhancement program," he said.
Such an assessment of the university might prompt some to ask what weaknesses the university may have, but Nellis said there's not a reason to worry.
"I don’t think we have any major concerns," he said, "but it’s not unusual for an institution to get a series of recommendations associated with this process."
Many university sectors are already independently improving, Nellis said, but recommendations spurred the team behind the QEP to develop a strategy that would showcase that improvement.
"On our campus, our faculty as well as our alumni felt that a couple of areas where we could strengthen the quality of the educational experience for our students relates around communication skills as well as being more globally connected," Nellis said. "So we took a part of our Matador Song, ‘bearing our banners far and wide,’ and we developed a theme called Communicating in a Global Society. So it’s really melding the various aspects of communication in our curriculum with helping our students understand more about the world in which they live."
The "globally connected" university, Nellis said, is leading the way in education that emphasizes international education, such as study abroad programs through Texas Tech and the university's embrace of international students - about 1 percent of the total student population.
"I just spoke with the head of our international programs office, Tibor Nagy, and he said we have a record number of faculty leading student teams abroad," Nellis said. "So very, very important – that’s the world we live in today.
"We have about 2,800 international students out of our 35,000. That enriches our campus community so that our students learn more about the culture of people from a variety of different settings, so we think it’s an enrichment to our campus community, but it’s also about our overall effort to move toward being a national research university."
This isn't the first QEP that Tech has completed. In 2010, the first plan was centered around ethics at the university, which transitioned into the eventual creation of the Texas Tech University Ethics Center.
For this round of the QEP, Nellis said special attention has been paid to executing what the theme of the plan promotes - communication.
"That’s part of the SACS process, and they want to make sure that there’s been a lot of involvement of faculty, staff and student awareness in this process of the development of the QEP," Nellis said. "So the community of Lubbock, they’ll see a lot of posters, signs up, we’re going to put some material on some of the buses around the city so that people will continually be reminded about QEP and communicating in a global society."
