Home

• Introduction:Institutional Overview
• Category 1:Helping Students Learn
• Category 2:Accomplishing Other Distinctive Objectives
• Category 3:Understanding Students’ and Other Stakeholders’ Needs
• Category 4:Valuing People
• Category 5:Leading and Communications
• Category 6:Supporting Institutional Operations
• Category 7:Measuring Effectiveness
• Category 8:Planning Continuous Improvement
• Category 9:Building Collaborative Relationships
• Appendices

Category 9:
Building Collaborative Relationships

9C1

The institution’s key collaborative relationships are divided into two categories: formal and informal.

The key formal collaborative relationships include:

• An emerging agreement with Robert Morris College
• An emerging matriculation agreement with the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis
• A matriculation agreement with the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis (See: Appendix 11, Collaborative Relationships with Other Educational Institutions)
• Co-sponsorship of an annual continuing education lecture in partnership with Loyola University School of Social Work
• Partnership (begun in 2007) with Casa Central, a community organization offering social services to the Northwest communities, where we provide clinical services to their clients.
• Establishment of working relationships with service companies such as gradschool.com, National Association of Social Workers (national and by state chapter), Infocus list service, and state licensing boards for recruitment purposes
• Establishment of a working relationship with EBSCO, our main digital library service provider
• Establishment of working relationships with outsourced financial aid services, who in turn work with lenders and servicers
• Establishment of a working relationship with a design firm which understands our mission and provides us with creative marketing resources

The key informal collaborative relationships include:

• Students and faculty members who work as faculty or adjunct faculty with other social work higher educational institutions or other clinical training institutions
• National and state clinical social work associations, including the Illinois Society for Clinical Social Work and the American Association of Psychoanalytic Clinical Social Work
• We build and strengthen relationships with individuals, businesses, and companies that can provide financial sponsorship such as our alumni, Hispanic Housing Development, and Merrill Lynch. Each of these organizations have been major sponsors of our annual fundraising efforts.

9C2

The partnerships listed in the context and processes questions were created based on our mission. Each partnership directly relates to our mission and provides opportunities and resources for either the organization as a whole or students. The emerging partnership agreements with educational and clinical training institutions are looking to our future survival as an independent institution. The clinical institute arrangements are carefully crafted to ensure future students for ICSW. The Robert Morris College collaboration is essentially a resource-sharing agreement that will help ensure our future.

Our ongoing challenge is to locate and recruit students with the interest, personal resources, capacities, and skills to commit to earning a Ph.D. Our students tend to come from a national pool rather than from any particular institution. However, with one local MSW program we do hold joint lectures and several of our graduates and current students are adjunct faculty. Several of our faculty and visiting lecturers are all but dissertation (ABD) students, faculty, or adjunct instructors at several other university based social work doctoral programs. Many of our faculty members hold appointments with a number of advanced clinical training programs in the Chicago metro area. Our students from the metropolitan area do tend to graduate from the local university-based programs. While we have no formal agreement for recruiting students from the university programs, our faculty, who are in place at these institutions, do serve a valuable recruiting function. We have signed letters of cooperation with one local advanced clinical training program, and are negotiating areas of cooperation with another local program.

Professional Clinical Social Work organizations such as the American Association of Psychoanalytic Clinical Social Work (AAPCSW) are another of our recruitment sources. They also provide opportunities for our students to present their work. Several or our graduates hold offices in these organizations, while members of our faculty and student body are regularly involved in planning conferences. Our students and graduates are well represented with a high number of scholarly papers selected by blind review panels. As a result ICSW is well known among this national group of social workers. We do not have a formal relationship with AAPCSW at this time. We routinely remind our faculty, students, and graduates that they are integral aspects of our recruitment processes.

In prioritizing our relationships with these organizations, we focus on:

• Potential for recruiting students
• Recruiting and sharing faculty
• Alignment with our mission statement
• Opportunities for our graduates

We build all of these respective relationships through effective exchange of expertise and, when indicated, articulated agreements.

We do not have institutions and employers that rely on a flow of students to meet their needs. Our students tend be professionally established before entering the program and come from a wide geographic area.

Due to the nature of the institution, the only organizations that provide services to our students are our financial aid lenders and servicers. The lenders and servicers are prioritized primarily by the volume of students who request them. Secondary to student request is the benefits that the lenders and servicers are willing to provide students during school and in repayment. A third important criterion is the kind of educational and networking opportunities that these organizations make available to students and staff members at the Institute.

Once a student service organization is selected, the Director of Student Services will usually maintain a relationship with one or more representatives of the respective organizations that help the school stay abreast of new laws or regulations, benefits, and educational opportunities.

We do have formal relationships with agencies and institutions with whom we have community service projects and educational/training institutions with which we have matriculation agreements. (See: Appendix 11 and 9C1.)

9P2

The Dean, the board, and key personnel involved with collaborative arrangements monitor and review processes related to our involvement. We look for the nature of the relationship and contractual agreement, degree of participation by members of our community, and feedback from those participating in any joint programs. Furthermore, as in other facets of the Institute, such as support services described in 6P1, we depend on one-on-one feedback from the ICSW community regarding any programs or organizations that we affiliate with. We also monitor the number of applicants from institutions with which we have formal and informal relationships. We additionally monitor how many of our graduates are teaching as adjuncts or are appointed to the faculty.

The central way of measuring the meeting of student needs with financial aid lenders and servicers is our cohort default rate. Since our default rate is lower than 0.2%, our lenders and servicers are meeting the needs of the former students by keeping them in repayment and out of default status.

9P3

The size of the school lends itself to effective relationships between staff, administration, students, and faculty. Small class size and one-on-one learning also contributes to building relationships. We begin with an orientation for new students a month prior to the beginning of class, where students are initially oriented to using the website and email as an additional source for communication. We often hold lunch with other classes for networking and cohort-building purposes. The deans also host an annual welcome party, an end-of-the-year party, and the entire community is invited to the annual graduation ceremony and fundraising dinner. Students in each cohort are also invited to participate in advisory meetings with the Dean of Students each semester to give feedback regarding the program, classes, and any issues within their cohort. During the first of these meetings a cohort will elect a student representative who monitors student contentment and relays any problems to the Dean or Dean of Students.

9P4

We do not formally collect and measure data regarding the above relationships in the area of applicants, joint faculty appointments, adjunct instructors, or full-time appointments at other institutions. As a consequence of developing our systems portfolio we are planning on undertaking a full-scale survey of all of our graduates. We have been successful in measuring the number of books published. We realize that an accounting of the wide range of alumni achievement is vital to illustrating that ICSW is fulfilling its mission.

We do monitor our involvement with other organizations when articulated agreements call for a provision of services and budget monitoring. We do measure data related to financial aid in keeping with mandated reporting and measure expenditures in the case of grant-supported community projects. This could also be an area for improvement. Designing and implementing measures of our involvement versus new student applications and inquiries, teaching, research, and leadership opportunities may be beneficial to ICSW in the future.

9R2

We see the trend for many institutions is towards collaborations, partnerships, affiliations, and mergers. We do not have quantifiable results to compare ourselves to other institutions of our size. We have recently begun to seriously explore formal collaborations. (See: Appendix 11.) However, any collaboration will be designed to maintain our identity and our commitment to clinical social work education at the doctoral level. A collaboration agreement that has just been approved with Robert Morris College is a major step for ICSW. As the letters of agreement indicate, it is a multi-step process that allows ICSW great flexibility as we potentially move towards involvement in a consortium of graduate programs aligned with Robert Morris.

9I1

Recently, ICSW reorganized administrative responsibilities to include the position of President. The role of President will concentrate on improving board and alumni relations as well as help identify and provide other opportunities to improve contacts outside the organization. The individual hired for this position has strong ties to the social work community and is familiar with the mission of ICSW. The role of Dean will focus on academic and student needs. We feel this is an opportunity to grow and expand our current processes and systems for building collaborative relationships. As the organizational chart indicates, the President’s responsibilities are limited to board development, fundraising, and alumni development. We do not view this as a major reorganization, only a focus of talent and time on needed areas of development.

Over the past year we have met regularly with our website and marketing designer. Building this relationship has strengthened our recruitment strategy to qualified prospective students and has improved our website. The numbers of requested information improved drastically due to the number working relationships we built over the previous years. Visitors to the website greatly improved due to the content, versatility, and resources added within the past year.

Our formal collaborative arrangements with educational institutions are carefully negotiated and reviewed within the contexts of the ICSW mission, vision, and long-term institutional needs. One of our distinctive features is also vulnerability. The challenges of maintaining a “stand alone” institution are great, and may not be in our best long-term interests.