What are AAC&U’s HIPs?

Students talk at a table

The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) serves as a catalyst for innovations that improve educational quality and equity and that support the success of all students, such as High-Impact Practices. To facilitate the adoption of HIPs across American higher education, AAC&U published George Kuh’s ground-breaking publication, High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter (2008). Kuh originally identified 10 High-Impact Practices and later added one more to the list. The 11 HIPs recognized by AAC&U and the USG project are: 

  1. Capstone Courses and Projects 
  2. Collaborative Assignments 
  3. Common Intellectual Experiences 
  4. Diversity/Global Learning 
  5. ePortfolios 
  6. First-Year Seminars and Experiences 
  7. Internships 
  8. Learning Communities 
  9. Service Learning, Community Service 
  10. Undergraduate Research 
  11. Writing Intensive courses 

Full descriptions of each HIP are available here. 

In 2013, George Kuh and Ken O’Donnell published Ensuring Quality & Taking High-Impact Practices to Scale which defined eight key elements that, when present in a course, help account for their impact. They are 

  1. Performance expectations set at appropriately high levels 
  2. Significant investment of time and effort by students over an extended period of time 
  3. Interactions with faculty and peers about substantive matters 
  4. Experiences with diversity, wherein students are exposed to and must contend with people and circumstances that differ from those with which students are familiar 
  5. Frequent, timely, and constructive feedback 
  6. Periodic, structured opportunities to reflect and integrate learning 
  7. Opportunities to discover relevance of learning through real-world applications 
  8. Public demonstration of competence 

For each element, they provided at least one example of how to integrate that element into a class. UGA faculty who would like a course identified as a HIPs course in Banner/Athena will be expected to demonstrate how some of these elements will be incorporated into their class.