Graduation Coordinators

We send out a list of students who have applied to graduate every quarter. You will receive this list at the beginning of the 8th week of the quarter, except for summer when it comes at the beginning of the 6th week. If you don't receive a list, either no students in your area applied to graduate, or you have already submitted notes for all your applicants.

If you have already submitted notes and approved the student for graduation, we won't ask you to submit notes again. If you are expecting to see a list and don’t, feel free to ask us about it by emailing graduation@highline.edu.

We use the department directory list to identify each department’s coordinator is. If your name is on the list, expect us to ask your permission to graduate students in any programs requiring approval that fall under your departmental area.

The programs that require coordinator approval prior to graduation are:

• All Professional-Technical AAS, AAS-T, BAS, and certificate completions
• All Associate of Science Degrees (AS)
• High School Diplomas that are not earned along with a two-year degree program.

We need to know three basic things:

1. What degree or certificate are you writing the note about?
2. What requirements does the student have left to complete?
3. Are there any substitutions, waived classes or other differences between the way the academic advisement report looks and the way you want us to apply that student’s classes?

For example: “I approve an AAS in Accounting after the currently enrolled ENGL&101 class and with a substitution of ACCT 800 for ACCT&201” is probably detailed enough for us to post the degree without requesting anything further from you. Barring anything unexpected, we would simply wait for their ENGL&101 passing grade and then post the degree.

On the other hand, a note stating only “Substitute ACCT 800 for ACCT&201” is great and helps us a lot to avoid rejecting a graduation application as incomplete – but does not imply that we can award the degree or even tell us what degree we might be awarded, so we would probably be sending a student with that note back to you in our next batch of graduation application evaluation requests to seek clarification.

You are welcome to advise students who trust you on the Associate of Arts transfer requirements provided you understand them – be very careful not to mislead the student into thinking you can approve substitutions or even approve graduation for these degrees. Substitutions are not allowed for Associate of Arts degrees – they are quite formulaic – and are approved within our department.

Our department often runs across students who report being told, for example, that taking more than 15 restricted area courses in an AA DTA is “okay” (per some advisor whose name they can’t remember). Since that’s an articulation rule and not a college policy, unhappiness ensues. Academic Advisement Report is usually very accurate for the AA degrees – so that is an excellent place to start in your advising. When in doubt about a DTA, have the student ask us by emailing graduation@highline.edu.

Some tricky rules that commonly sneak up on advisors are:

• A degree must contain at least 90 credits (not 89… not 89.5…).
• A student’s college cumulative GPA must be 2.0 or better to earn a degree.
• 23 credits out of a 90-credit degree have to have been completed at Highline.
• Our accreditors say that each AAS degree and certificate 45 credits or longer must have certain specific designated communications, computation and human relations courses – our department may refuse a substitution if we can’t see how those requirements are met. If we allow a yoga class as a computation substitution, we aren’t doing our jobs insuring our accreditation standards for academic rigor are met.
• Advisors who are not the Department Coordinators don’t get to make substitutions, waivers or exceptions to anything.
  Yes, folks who are not you try to advise your students all the time. We use the list here to know who each department’s coordinator is.
• Department Coordinators don’t get to make substitutions, waivers, or exceptions to degrees outside of their department.
• Department Coordinators don’t get to make substitutions, waivers, or exceptions to Associate of Arts transfer degrees.
• Transfer degrees have very limited amounts of “non-transferable” credits allowed within them. In general, don’t advise a student to take more than 15 credits of prof-tech classes towards an AA DTA or more than 5 credits towards an AS degree. Most Prof-Tech classes are “non-transferable” but not all. You can tell if a course is “non-transferable” if it has no AA distributions listed on the course description in the catalog.

Shoot us an email! graduation@highline.edu is our favorite way to hear from you.

We like communicating through the general graduation email account because it ensures that someone will be available to read and respond. Emails to a single staff member are likely to sit for a long time if that person is scheduled to be out of the office, but we cover each other in monitoring the resource account and respond to emails there within 2 business days.

If you would like to schedule a time to meet or to talk on the phone, ask us. We are happy to talk with you, but need to schedule our days (just like you need to schedule around your class times) and may need to do extensive research before talking with you about a student’s situation. So shoot us an email to get the ball rolling.