New CAS standards available: collegiate rec program & health promotion

NIRSA’s partnership with The Council for Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) provides NIRSA members with access to standards that can be used to assess the quality and strength of their recreation programs. CAS is a consortium of 42 student service professional associations that develop and promulgate standards and guidelines. NIRSA has been a member of CAS since 1981.

Collegiate recreation program standards revised

Earlier this year, the CAS standards for collegiate recreation programs were revised to a different format. Although the content of these specific recreation standards was not altered, their presentation and organization are substantially different. NIRSA members are encouraged to review these newly-revised standards.

New resource: health promotion standards

Additionally, NIRSA members now have access to the standards for health promotion services.

Stacy Connell, co-chair of NIRSA’s Health and Wellbeing Task Force, notes, “NIRSA continues to hear members’ desire for health and wellbeing resources. NIRSA providing the CAS Standards for Health Promotion Services at no cost is a wonderful resource for campus recreation directors and departments that have recently integrated health promotion into their portfolio.”

Stacy also shares, “I encourage members who utilize the standards to view these as the minimum guidelines for risk reduction and population health management at the department level. To benchmark integrated health and wellbeing efforts on campus, I recommend utilizing the 2018 CAS Standards for Advancing Health and Wellbeing: A Cross Functional Framework as these standards take into consideration the challenges of an institutional approach to integration and build capacity to overcome through these obstacles.”

Indeed, to further meet the need to collaborate in delivering such programs and services, CAS developed the Cross-Functional Framework for Advancing Health and Wellbeing. This provides an approach for addressing the health and wellbeing needs of the campus community from a multi- and inter-disciplinary perspective through teams of higher education professionals from different fields or functional areas.

How to access these resources

The CAS collegiate recreation program standards as well as the CAS health promotion standards are available on the NIRSA CAS webpage. The corresponding self-assessment guidelines, cross-functional frameworks, and other valuable resources are available for purchase on the CAS website.