Institutional Quality and Accreditation

The following presentation gives an introduction to regional accreditation in the United States, the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), and the purposes of accreditation. It also gives an overview of the ACCJC accreditation process, the 2002 Accreditation Standards, and the reliance on evidence in accreditation. It is based on an ACCJC workshop by Dr. Deborah G. Blue and Mr. G. Jack Pond from 2006. Workshop participants were told the presentations would be posted online for download and could be used for in-house training. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, this did not happen. Rachel Mason and I reproduced and adapted the original presentations for staff training sessions on accreditation and continuous quality improvement in 2007. This version is a revision of the 2007 adaptation. Some material has been deleted, some has been revised, updated and/or expanded, and about a third of the pages are new to this version. The additional material includes a new map of the U.S. accreditation regions, and charts of possible ACCJC actions, the ACCJC 6-year accreditation cycle, and a simplified version of the evidence-based integrated planning and assessment cycle required by the 2002 Standards.

TFR InstitutionQuality&Accreditation ACCJC2006 TVT2009

This presentation is posted as per the original intentions of Dr. Blue and Mr. Pond, if you find material in it useful please include a citation to their original workshop in addition to this post. The map and charts were created by Todd V. Titterud for The Follow-Up Report and can be cited separately.