Newly revised Standards for Fraternity and Sorority Advising Programs

The Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) is pleased to announce the release of a new set of standards for Fraternity and Sorority Advising Programs.

CAS, a consortium composed of over 40 collaborating professional associations representing over 115,000 professionals in higher education, has developed standards for 48 functional areas and 3 cross-functional teams, and rooted them in the scholarship and work conducted within their respective fields. These revised standards delineate expectations for practitioners and educators in related functional areas, and are an update to the standards published in the 2019 CAS Professional Standards for Higher Education (10th ed).

The CAS revision committee was chaired by Jane Hamblin, Chief Executive Officer for Mortar Board National College Senior Honor Society, and a CAS Representative from the Association of College Honor Societies (ACHS). Hamblin commented on the relevance of the revised standards for today's fraternity and sorority advising programs, noting that “Fraternities and sororities are essential to cocurricular college life. The standards guide professionals through the very complicated program development necessary to ensure that fraternities and sororities of all types and histories provide equity, safety and relevance to students who are their members.”

CAS partnered closely with experts from the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors (AFA) in the revision of these standards. Monica Lee Miranda, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Student Involvement at the University of South Florida, and CAS Representative from AFA, served as the CAS Expert to the group in aligning research and practice recommendations from the field with the CAS standards' focus on quality programs and services and promoting student learning, development, and success. Miranda, who frequently engages in consulting work within the FSAP community, reflected on the value of the FSAP standards to the field: “...I continue to find the campuses with strong utilization of the FSAP standards to often be some of the strongest communities. Their utilization of the FSAP assists fraternity and sorority life units in knowing what is critical to a strong foundation from which to ensure the effective structures and systems are provided for the support for the fraternity and sorority community and their success.”

Miranda was joined by additional professionals who provided invaluable feedback on the standards and contextual statement; that group included:

• Stephanie Baldwin, University of Colorado-Boulder, AFA
• Kevin Bazner, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi, AFA
• Jenny Loeffelman, Cornell University, AFA
• Juan Guardia, University of Cincinnati, AFA
• Michael Hayes, University of Chicago, AFA
• Veronica Moore, Delta Upsilon, AFA
• Mindy Sutton Noss, Southern Methodist University, AFA
• Carolyn Whittier, Valparaiso University, AFA

Hamblin commented on the importance of this team's collaborative work, noting “The volunteers who came together to review the CAS standards… brought a 360-degree perspective to their work. The result is an imminently practical and thoroughly up-to-date guide…”

CAS is proud to release this revised set of standards for an important and evolving functional area in higher education. Both the standards and the Self-Assessment Guide are now available in the CAS store, and are free to CAS annual subscribers.

The newly revised standards for Fraternity and Sorority Advising Programs (FSAP) are now available at: https://store.cas.edu/fraternity-and-sorority-advising-programs-standards/

An accompanying Self-Assessment Guide (SAG) is available at https://store.cas.edu/fraternity-and-sorority-advising-self-assessment-guide/

Please direct all questions and inquiries about the revised standards to the CAS Executive Director ([email protected]).