For Emily Monti, program review isn't just a required reporting process. It connects evidence, faculty reflection, institutional planning, and long-term improvement. As director of academic programs and accreditation at John A. Logan College, Monti oversees the institution’s program review process, including the five-year comprehensive review cycle required by the Illinois Community College Board (ICCB). More recently, her work has also focused on helping the college develop an annual program review process, a shift driven by feedback from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) calling for a stronger, more systematic approach to planning and review.
John A. Logan College launched its first annual program review cycle in the spring of 2025, with the goal of completing three full annual cycles before its next HLC accreditation visit. Rather than treating the annual review as a separate requirement, Monti describes it as a way to gradually bring pieces of the comprehensive review into a more regular institutional rhythm. Over time, she expects the annual process to strengthen the connections among program review, budgeting, program viability, strategic planning, and institutional decision-making.
This new process addresses some of the challenges the college had experienced with program review in the past. Monti explains that before, faculty members had to gather, organize, and interpret much of the program data themselves. The process was time-consuming and difficult to manage, especially when faculty struggled to access, share, download, or work from the same data files.
Beyond the logistics, deeper challenges stemmed from inconsistent data tracking and analysis. Faculty did not always have an easy way to compare their programs with other programs in the same discipline, with broader institutional patterns, or with measures such as cost per credit hour. Indeed, a report by Bailey and Alfonso (2005) on program effectiveness in community colleges found that “Faculty and even researchers at community colleges rarely have the opportunity to discuss research on program effectiveness in a way that allows them to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and lessons of the studies” (p. 2). In that environment, program review could easily become more about completing a document than engaging in meaningful reflection.
To address those barriers, John A. Logan College has made data access and institutional support central to its new process. The college’s Institutional Effectiveness and Research (IER) office has expanded its staff to include an associate vice president, a data analyst, and another staff member, and has developed dashboards that faculty can access. The dashboards allow users to look more closely at program-level data when needed. This office also pre-populates program review templates with key program information so faculty do not have to start the program review process by searching for data themselves. Instead, faculty can spend more time reviewing the information, asking questions, and responding to the program review prompts, with the goal of removing unnecessary barriers so they can focus more easily on improving the analysis.
Monti emphasizes that program review should remain faculty-driven, but that faculty also need clear structures and support resources. For example, at John A. Logan College, faculty are given dedicated time during the spring kickoff to work on program review, and representatives from offices such as IER and finance are available to answer questions. Monti herself attends department meetings and offers one-on-one assistance when needed. She says this combination of shared work time, accessible data, and direct support has helped make the process feel less burdensome and more collaborative. Faculty still interpret the data and address their programs' needs, while academic leaders and institutional offices help ensure they do not do that work in isolation.
Monti says departments now submit completed reviews on time and receive feedback from academic leaders before sending reports to ICCB. For an institution that has experienced delays or incomplete submissions in the past, this process has produced meaningful change and progress. The college is also creating a repository of annual reviews so that when programs reach the comprehensive review cycle, they can look back across several years of reflection and data rather than trying to reconstruct everything at every review cycle. Monti describes this as moving away from program review as a static document and toward a living document, one that stays at the forefront of institutional practice and supports decisions over time.
The idea of a living document matters because it changes the purpose of the process. Instead of reviewing a program once every five years and then setting the report aside, an annual review gives faculty and administrators a record of what they have noticed, what they have tried, and what has changed. As the process develops, Monti hopes the college can report back to the state with greater detail and nuance by including deeper data analysis and clearer evidence of how programs use what they learn from these analyses. In this sense, the annual process stays compliant and builds systems that strengthen a comprehensive review.