HLC Peer Review Team Visit Description

In November of 2019, the UW campus will host a peer review team as part of our HLC reaccreditation process.  The peer reviewers, who are faculty and administrators at other universities and trained by HLC, will visit Wyoming around November 16-20 (dates will be confirmed later).  The peer review team will meet with several groups of faculty, students, staff, alumni, Trustees, and other stakeholders.  They will visit both the Laramie and Casper campuses, and about a month prior to their arrival, we will provide them with a 35,000 word report called the Assurance Argument, supported by an Evidence File, as well as a separate Federal Compliance Filing.  The Assurance Argument makes available in our Evidence File, and references throughout the Argument, direct evidence of how we meet HLC Accreditation Criteria and each subcomponent (“Core Component”) of the criteria.  The Federal Compliance Filing is a data-driven report specifically designed to answer criteria mandated by the U.S. Department of Education and other relevant federal agencies as well as numerous federal laws.

The peer review team is not a group of auditors.  They are, like us, people who work in higher education and care deeply about student success and the creative, scholarly work our faculty do.  Just as your scholarly work is peer reviewed for quality, the peer reviewers are here to learn about us.  They are extensively trained in the HLC criteria and federal compliance requirements, but their full time jobs are as academics or administrators.  Don’t be afraid of them! 

The peer reviewers will ask us a lot of questions – not just administrators, and not just Academic Affairs, but EVERYONE.  They will ask all of us questions about our mission, how we meet the HLC criteria, and our evidence.  They will want to see – upfront and while they are here – a lot of evidence that we live our mission, and that our mission aligns with the criteria.  We will prepare the campus to be good hosts, and to share all the information the peer reviewers need.