Mission

The Graduate College provides strong leadership to facilitate Top Tier graduate education, extend educational opportunities to graduate students, ensure the consistent and fair application of policies, and provide support for graduate faculty and programs by cultivating an environment in which the highest quality graduate scholarship and research can thrive. Our guiding principles are: excellence, equity, diversity, opportunity, and impact. These core values reflect our commitment to creating a campus culture in which graduate education and graduate students flourish. The role of the Graduate College is to promote excellence in graduate education, and foster a community of graduate faculty and scholars that is characterized by diversity, openness to new ideas, and the production of cutting edge research, scholarship and creative activity, and to provide 100% Solutions. 

Goals

The overarching and guiding goals of the Graduate College are:

  1. To establish and maintain University-wide graduate standards, policies, and best practices that advance our top tier mission and promote excellence.
  2. To support program-level graduate requirements and policies, as well as graduate curriculum and innovative new program development.

  3. To successfully recruit, admit, retain, progress, support, and graduate a diverse and outstanding graduate student body.

  4. To provide outstanding opportunities for career and professional development throughout the graduate student lifecycle.
  5. To foster scholarly and creative excellence among the graduate faculty and graduate students through research, teaching, and professional development opportunities.

Objectives

The organization of the Graduate College supports the accomplishment of these major objectives, in pursuit of our goals:

  1. To establish and maintain NSHE, University, and Graduate College policies and standards in a fair, consistent and equitable manner.
  2. To strategically create high quality, innovative, and responsive traditional and interdisciplinary graduate programs that meet the needs of the region, the state, and the broader discipline, and to periodically review all graduate programs via routine assessment and scheduled program review processes to ensure high quality educational programs.
  3. To support and maintain academic quality in graduate programs and curriculum, through collaboration with graduate programs, the Graduate Council, and the Faculty Senate program review process.
  4. To increase graduate student diversity and quality through focused outreach strategies and internal programming targeted at identifying, admitting, and supporting under-represented applicants and all students.
  5. To be attentive to graduate student retention issues and improve graduation rates through strategic tracking and assessment mechanisms, effective outreach, seamless support to graduate programs, student professional development opportunities, and an overall paradigm of service to our constituents.
  6. To enhance opportunities and support available for graduate student funding in the form of graduate assistantship (GA) packages, research funding, scholarships, and fellowships.
  7. To provide responsive and efficient customer service and support to our constituents as befits our 100% Solutions mantra.
  8. To support and enable graduate faculty governance, and to nourish a climate of excellence for and among our graduate faculty, including graduate faculty support for outstanding graduate student mentorship.
  9. To work closely with the Graduate Council, graduate faculty, the Graduate & Professional Student Association (GPSA) and graduate students, and graduate programs, to achieve our shared goals and enhance the graduate community at UNLV; we strongly believe that striving for excellence is a collaborative effort.

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Striving for excellence is a collaborative effort. The Graduate College works closely with the Graduate Council, graduate faculty, the GPSA and graduate students, and graduate programs, to maintain and enhance excellence in individual disciplines and to achieve our shared mission, goals, and objectives.