News from the Council for Higher Education Accreditation-Spring 2022
Accreditation Views
Higher Education and Quality Assurance: What Should Change and What Remains the Same
At the 2022 CHEA/CIQG Annual Conference in Washington, DC in January, a panel of three college and university presidents addressed the conference’s theme: When it comes to higher education and quality assurance, what should change and what remains the same? The conversation among the three presidents centered on changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and their institutions’ response to the challenges presented by the pandemic. As the panel’s moderator, CHEA President Cynthia-Jackson Hammond noted, "Three words keep coming up: moving, changing, adapting.”
Following is an excerpt from their remarks.
Robert Clark
President
Husson University
One of the things that most impressed me during the past two years is how adaptive institutions are and must be. In today’s world, to be relevant, we can’t be slow to change. Another area of change and growth has been communications – not just with students, faculty and staff but also with parents and people in the community who want to know the standards for the university as we go through these transitions. We are models that the community looks to. Those communications have been to keeping in touch with our constituencies and providing leadership for the healthcare environment we find ourselves in. We also had to pivot quickly to the online environment … and I was pleased and surprised that students rated faculty engagement highly in this online experience. I would probably attribute this to the fact that faculty practically bent over backward to be responsive to students. Students appreciated that adaptability and flexibility.
Dottie King
President
Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
When we think about COVID and the student experience, probably students and faculty have been through the most dramatic changes. They are the foundation of all we do, so all of us have needed to change and adapt. Faculty as a whole aren’t known to be change agents, but they really have done a good job in understanding what students are going through and what they need to do to persist. Beyond that, I spent a lot of time with students during these two years; students have had lot to deal with not only because of COVID but the political atmosphere in our country. I’ve had important conversations with student leaders that have helped our college remain, I think, civil. It’s been incumbent on me to lead through more than just the pandemic.
Anthony Munroe
President
Borough of Manhattan Community College
At BMCC, we went through a lot of change, including a new president, and found ourselves asking how do you respond to change, in the context of a pandemic you have absolutely no control over? What does the educational experience look like in a hybrid environment? The overarching question has been: How do we conduct our business, while maintaining the integrity of our mission and ensuring that students get a quality experience, while staying safe in a world that is constantly changing? We have become more adept at being able to pivot, in short order, to remain relevant, to remain reliable as an institution and to uphold quality. Faculty, staff all were quickly adaptable. Never did I hear, “That’s not in my responsibility.” The responsiveness, the empathy, these are some of the core values that really came into focus as the result of this pandemic.
Reflective Learning and New Practices in Accreditation
The 2022 CHEA/CCIQG Annual Conference featured a panel of leaders from institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations, discussing the challenges and opportunities for accreditation posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The wide-ranging conversation touched on virtual site visits, the pivot to distance education, and how their accrediting organization adjusted to remote working.
Following is an excerpt from their remarks, with a focus on the panelists’ comments on accreditation decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Timothy Eaton
President
Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS)
If anything, our commission has been a little more deliberate on accreditation decisions. Commissioners have sought more, rather than less, information on which to make accreditation decisions. Also, since the beginning of the pandemic and the pivot to online education, TRACS wanted to know what our institutions are doing enhance their distance education activities. They needed to know that institutions will need to get TRACS approval if they are going to continue to use distance education in the future. Just because they were permitted to go to distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t mean that they are automatically a distance education institution.
Frank Gerbasi
Chief Executive Officer
Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs
There wasn’t any change in the way the accreditation decisions the commission made related to continuing accreditation. However, our organization did let programs know that accreditation decisions made on the basis of virtual site visits could be changed following an in-person onsite visit if the findings warranted such a change. In preparing for those follow-up onsite visits, there may be issues that were flagged for specific review onsite. We also saw a specific impact on clinical education, which could not be moved online but require hands-on clinical experience. The result was, because hospitals closed to students for some time during the first part of the COVID-19 pandemic, some students simply were not able to complete graduation requirements when they had planned to as they were not able to meet the minimum clinical experiences requirements.
Belle Wheelan
President
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges
There was no change in our decision-making. It has continued unaffected by the operational changes that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. One important change we did make, however, is that we mandated that all our institutions not formerly approved for distance education put in the paperwork to do that. All of our members are now approved to offer programs via distance education. It is also important to note that we are required by the U.S. Department of Education to do onsite, follow-up visits for any institution whose accreditation we reaffirmed where we conducted an online site visit. That is a requirement for all accrediting organizations recognized by the Department, and in our case means around 250 institutions.
Government Affairs
Accreditation Legislation Passes In Florida
Legislation directed at higher education accreditation was passed by the Florida Senate and House of Representatives in early March. Florida’s governor is expected to sign the legislation into law, which would become effective on July 1, 2022.
The legislation states that all public higher education institutions in Florida, as well as nonpublic institutions that receive state funds from Florida, “may not be accredited by the same accrediting agency or association for consecutive accreditation cycles.” While the bill stipulates that the institution may keep its current accreditor if they “are not granted candidacy status before its next reaffirmation or fifth-year review date,” all institutions “must seek” candidacy with a different accrediting organization than their current accreditor.
The Council for Higher Education Accreditation sent comments to Florida’s governor, Department of Education, Senate and House of Representatives. Copies of those letters can be found here. In the letters, CHEA President Cynthia Jackson-Hammond noted a number of concerns, including the time and effort that would be required for accredited colleges and universities and the potential negative impact of losing an accrediting organization’s historical understanding of the institutions it accredits.
CHEA will continue to follow this issue closely and will keep members informed on any developments.
Communications
New Video Available from CHEA
An institution's accreditation means that it meets standards of quality as a higher education provider. In addition, it demonstrates that college or university’s commitment to institutional improvement and student success. It is important that institutions find opportunities to communicate about accreditation's value to students, parents, and society. CHEA has produced a short video discussing ways that institutions can more effectively communicate about their accreditation and why it is so important.
The video from CHEA also notes that resources that can be helpful in communicating about accreditation are available on the CHEA website, including the “About Accreditation” section. Click here to view the full video, as well as to view other videos in the “Conversations With CHEA” series.
Upcoming Meetings
Two meetings of importance for CHEA and CHEA members are coming up:
- The Annual Meeting of the CHEA Board of Directors, including an open public session, will be held in Washington, DC on Monday, May 2, 2022.
- The CHEA Summer Roundtable, an exclusive benefit of CHEA membership, will take place virtually in June 2022. Look for more information on the upcoming Summer Roundtable to be emailed to you in the weeks ahead.