Welcome to the St. Edward’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) page. This site serves as a central location to house information related to St. Edward’s University’s exciting new QEP. St. Edward’s University goes through the process of reaffirmation of regional accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) every ten years. The QEP is one required component of the process and “describes a carefully designed and focused course of action that addresses a well-defined topic or issue(s) related to enhancing student learning” http://www.sacscoc.org/genaccproc.asp. We are pleased to announce that since Spring 2015, the SEU community has been diligently working on identifying a new QEP. Our new Quality Enhancement Plan is entitled, VOCATION: DISCOVERING ONE’S PURPOSE IN A CHANGING WORLD. We envision this QEP to be focused on enhancing students’ discovery of life purpose, calling, and meaning within the context of a Holy Cross, liberal arts education; and we look forward to refining and developing the focus of the QEP which is due to SACSCOC on February 15, 2017 .
Please use this site to give us your feedback about the QEP, to follow along with history and updates , to access contact information of your QEP committee members, see our reaffirmation of accreditation timeline, and view survey results.
Please tweet us using the hashtag #SEUQEP
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
St. Edward’s University’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), Vocation: Discovering One’s Purpose in a Changing World, will provide our students with a four-year, integrated plan for vocational discovery. Our goal is to emphasize and enrich the Holy Cross tradition of vocation by inviting students to contemplate and plan:
- what contribution they want to make;
- how they are preparing to make this contribution;
- in what contexts they can make these contributions;
- how they will integrate their liberal arts experience with complex problems faced by the world today, and
- what contribution they will make
At the heart of our mission is the cultivation of “mind and heart” as well as the Holy Cross practice of “preparing useful citizens for society”. The intertwining of these concepts form a core component of our identity—a component embodied in vocational discovery. Our definition of vocation embraces the Latin roots of the term VOCARE (to call) and VOX (voice) meaning calling. As part of our mission to help students “understand themselves, clarify their personal values and recognize their responsibility to the world community” we are committed to cultivating their callings and life purpose(s).
Our QEP was chosen through a campus-wide selection and development process that engaged students, faculty, staff, and administration in a variety of ways including presentations, surveys, workshops, institutes, and forums. We also drew on institutional research and assessment data that revealed St. Edward’s students place a high value on life goal and career planning and expect that a degree from St. Edward’s will present opportunities for successful careers (however, although identifying a career is one aspect of discovering one’s life purpose, it is not the only aspect).
To achieve our ambitious campus-wide plan, students will engage in intentional, explicit opportunities for vocational discovery over four years. Current processes and structures will be highlighted and leveraged and new curriculum and co-curriculum will be developed. Faculty and staff will continue a tradition of vocational discovery in order to model and guide students in the process.
Because our Holy Cross mission has deep tradition of vocational discovery, the administration fully supports our QEP, and is committed to providing necessary resources. Over the course of the next five years, we are certain that Vocation: Discovering One’s Purpose in a Changing World will impact our campus community and prepare our students for meaningful and purposeful lives.