High-impact practices, explained for student affairs

“High-impact practice” appears in strategic plans, accreditation narratives, and program proposals, and it is used loosely in most of them. That looseness has a cost: the phrase is only persuasive to an academic reviewer because it refers to something specific, and every casual use makes it slightly less useful the next time you need it.

This is the precise version, and what a student affairs division can honestly claim.

What the term actually refers to

High-impact practices are a named set of teaching and learning practices catalogued by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) as showing evidence of significant educational benefit for students. AAC&U’s published list runs to twelve:

• First-year seminars and experiences
• Common intellectual experiences
• Learning communities
• Writing-intensive courses
• Collaborative assignments and projects
• Undergraduate research
• Diversity and global learning
• Service learning and community-based learning
• Internships
• Capstone courses and projects
• ePortfolios
• Open educational resources

That is the list. A program not on it is not thereby low-impact, and a program on it is not automatically well run on your campus. The list names practices with a research base, nothing more and nothing less.

What the twelve have in common

The taxonomy is less useful than the conditions underneath it. Across the practices, the same features recur: sustained effort over an extended period, substantive interaction with faculty and peers, engagement with people and ideas unlike one’s own, frequent and meaningful feedback, and a public demonstration of what was learned.

Those conditions are the mechanism. A first-year seminar taught as a lecture with no feedback and no interaction is a first-year seminar that will not produce the effect. Which is also the good news for student affairs: the conditions are portable, and a great deal of co-curricular work already meets them.

Two of the twelve probably already live in your division

Before making any argument by analogy, check what you are already operating and failing to report as such.

Service learning and community-based learning is frequently housed in student affairs, run through student organizations, service offices, or leadership programs. Internships, the practice with the clearest line to employment, are often facilitated by career services rather than by academic departments.

If either describes your division, you are running high-impact practices now. The gap is usually reporting: the work happens, and the annual report describes it as engagement programming rather than in the language the provost’s office is already using.

Where co-curricular leadership programming fits

Structured leadership programming is not on the list, and it satisfies most of the conditions the list rests on. It runs across a term rather than an afternoon. It is built on peer interaction with real accountability. It typically culminates in a project and a presentation of that project, which is a public demonstration in the sense the framework means. And it produces exactly the reflective artifacts an ePortfolio exists to hold.

The mistake is to argue that your program belongs on AAC&U’s list. Nobody is taking applications, and the argument reads as advocacy. The stronger move is to describe the program in the conditions the list is built on and to claim only the connections you can genuinely support:

• A culminating team project is capstone-like work: say capstone-like, and describe it.
• A documented community partnership is service learning, if community partners actually shaped the work.
• A reflection requirement collected in a portfolio is an ePortfolio practice.

Each of those is checkable. That is why they carry more weight than the label applied to itself.

Access is part of the finding, not a footnote

A practice benefits the students who reach it. High-impact practices are unevenly distributed, and the students least likely to reach them (commuters, part-time and working students, online learners, first-generation students) are the ones for whom the effect would matter most.

The pattern shows up plainly in adjacent data. Our State of Higher Ed 2026 research found 84.3% of undergraduates know their school offers career services while only 46% of those have used them, which works out to 38.8% of all undergraduates. Availability is not participation, and a program reporting availability is reporting the wrong number.

So report participation by population alongside any outcome. If an overall effect is concentrated in students who were already thriving, that is a different finding than it appears to be, and it is better to say so yourself.

How to write it up

Three sentences do most of the work in an accreditation narrative or a program review.

First, name the practice precisely and attribute the framework: “Service learning and community-based learning, one of the high-impact practices identified by AAC&U, is delivered through…” Second, evidence the conditions rather than asserting the label: duration, contact with faculty and peers, feedback points, and the public demonstration. Third, report participation disaggregated, and say who is not reaching it.

Then close the loop. An accreditor is reviewing your assessment cycle, not your enthusiasm: outcome, measure, evidence, interpretation, a documented change, and re-measurement. Our guide to measuring student outcomes covers what each audience is really testing, and reporting co-curricular outcomes upward covers the write-up itself.

Do this next

Audit what your division already runs against the twelve. You are looking for two things: practices you operate but describe in other language, and conditions you nearly meet: a program that would be capstone-like if it ended in a presentation, or portfolio-ready if reflections were collected somewhere durable. Both are cheaper to fix than to found, and both are claims you can defend in the document where it counts.