Role for Students in Decision-making
This credit recognizes institutions that engage students, staff, faculty and local community members in the ongoing governance of the college or university. Governance includes a variety of organizational functions and decision-making processes, from financial oversight and personnel management to goal-setting and strategic planning. Sustainability requires participatory processes and structures that empower stakeholder groups to come together and work collaboratively to address sustainability challenges through access to and involvement in institutional governance. Without transformed governance structures, many sustainability gains cannot be realized.
Part 1
Institution has adopted a framework for engaging internal stakeholders (i.e., students, staff, faculty) in governance. The framework includes:
Representative bodies through which students, staff and/or faculty can each participate in governance (e.g., student council, staff council, faculty senate);
And/or
Elected student, staff and/or faculty representatives on the institution’s highest governing body. To count, representatives must be elected by their peers or appointed by a representative student, staff or faculty body or organization.
This metric is looking for which processes the students have a formal role in decision-making:
For Wikirate researchers:
Institutions who report to the STARS program are listed on the STARS Participants & Reports website.
Use the institution Index, CTRL F, or Command F to search for the institution you want to research
By clicking on the hyperlinked name of the institution, you will be redirected to the page where all their STARS reports are listed. You can select either the most recent report, or one of the older reports to start tracking their performance over time.
NB: While the values in the reports might apply to different points in time (performance year, baseline year, most recent, etc.), the submission date of the report should be listed as the “year” on Wikirate. This is to ensure that reports of the same submission year can be compared. Any time specific information for the individual values should be included in the comment to that specific metric value.
To narrow down your search, navigate the reports’ index using the Reporting Category - Planning & Administration - and Credit Category - Coordination, Planning and Governance - to finally select the Credit Title: Governance.
You should now be on the report page that discloses for which processes the students have a formal role in decision-making. To locate the exact value you can search the page using CTRL F or Command F with keywords like students, formal role, and decision-making.
Always check the metric question and methodology for the unit of measure or currency - researchers may need to carry out calculations or conversions before entering the final metric value
Add comments to include details of simple or complex calculations or conversions made to determine the metric value and document any relevant contextual information, like:
a brief description of the formal student role in regard to each area indicated, including examples from the previous three years
Further guidance on how to research values is available here, including detailed guidance on adding, editing and checking metric values.