The student applies via ctcLink when registering for their final quarter of classes.

Graduation staff complete an initial evaluation within 3 weeks of application and send an email response to the student’s Highline email account acknowledging the application.

If a student is applying for a degree or high school completion, this is the time we load a graduation application fee onto their record.
This is included in the email notification. The student must pay the fee prior to their paper diploma being released to them.

Students not anticipated to graduate after the upcoming quarter are referred back to the adviser and must reapply.
Both an email and a hard copy letter are sent, and the application form is returned to the student. We don’t charge any fee for a returned application.

In the 7^th week of each term (the 5^th week for summer), we begin to organize and recheck all Prof-Tech, High School, and AS applications to see if evaluation notes have been left in the Academic Advisement Report between our initial intake of the application and that time. If a complete note has been added already, the file is moved to step 6 in this process.

In the 8^th week of each term (the 6^th week for summer), we send out an email to each coordinator with a list of students needing evaluations.

We also send two lists to the Dean of Instruction for Professional Technical Education – all the evaluations that have been received from coordinators already for the current quarter prior to week 8 and those that we are newly requesting. This was a feedback loop that was asked of us and is not intended to be punitive – the new requests are new – we don’t expect you to have known about them before this.

In the 9^th week of each term (the 7^th week for summer), we begin to recheck each application for new notes in Academic Advisement Report. We usually cycle through the whole list twice looking for updates as they trickle in.

At the end of the week or the beginning of week 10, we will send a second report to the Dean of Instruction for Prof-Tech Education showing if there are any evaluations we are still waiting for a response about. Everyone feels quite happy when the list of evaluations still missing at this point is low – but again – this is not meant to be punitive. Rather it should serve as a signal that some disconnect has occurred between graduation staff and the department coordinator for those students. Reach out to us – we want to graduate students and are excited whenever we hear you say that we can!

After official evaluation, students are sorted into groups by when we think they will be done with their course requirements.

Anyone who has already completed and earned grades in all their required classes would be awarded their credential at this point.

Students anticipated to graduate after an upcoming quarter will be queued for review after grading for that term.

After the quarter is over, if the student has completed all requirements, the credential will be awarded within 3 weeks of grades posting and the diploma mailed within 15 business days of posting. We email the student after their degree is posted and again when their diploma is sent.

If requirements are not met, the student is notified and the graduation file is retained (and checked) for three additional quarters. After that, the student is notified that their application is being archived and they must reapply.

We send names out once per quarter in a group. Typically these are sent out at the beginning of the 8th week of the quarter (or the 6th week for summer). If you don’t get a list of names, it’s possible either no students applied to graduate in your area that quarter or you have completed notes for all of your applicants already.

If you have made notes already and we can explicitly tell you are approving the student for graduation, we won’t bother you by requesting 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 would rather you ask us to double-check for you than miss a graduate!

We use this list to know who 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.