Recently, I sat in on a meeting as part of a leadership committee that was looking at how a division can shore up its policies, practices, services, and documentation in preparation for an upcoming accreditation visit.

As part of the discussion, we were asked to use a rubric by a respected educational organization to see how well our systems stood up to the various quality standards. We had an assessment system to evaluate each cell of the rubric, with 3 being a high and optimal score, and 0 being that the particular was not observable in the context.

The Occasion of Accreditation

Accreditation is an important process in higher education of a kind of peer review by a select team of administrators who visit various institutions and pore through various documents to get an accurate sense of the internal operations of the institution. The non-recommendation for accreditation is a death knell for a program or a department or a university, so it’s critical that the regulatory agencies that oversee various programs or departments and those that oversee universities…get an honest and thorough look at the schools.

Given the amount of politics in higher education, various universities may request that particular individuals be removed off an accreditation team for more fairness, particularly if there is some “bad blood” between individuals. That said, most of the time, from what I’ve heard, such teams go forward as set.

The point is to get insights from outside the institution in order to make sure that local dynamics are aligned to national-level standards. The potential myopia and other challenges of local settings should not hinder quality work. An accreditation visit also highlights the larger community of higher education educators and gives a sense of deeper responsibility beyond one’s own direct constituencies.

Years before an accreditation visit (which happens every ten years), universities are putting the structures into place to showcase the university’s programs. As a matter of course, department should have long been collecting program assessment data. They should have been upholding high standards in their hiring and workplace policies. They should have been ensuring that national, state, and local laws as well as policies have been upheld—as accurately as possible.

Then the lead-up to the visit itself is used as occasion for professional staff to work together and to address a range of quality processes. They try to shore up systems. They start collecting information years ahead—so that new initiatives don’t look all so shiny or creaky-new that the team wises up to the fact that something new was integrated just for the accreditation visit.

Discussions around the Rubric

So there we were at the meeting. We had already each reviewed the rubric and made some personal insights assessing the university’s strengths and weaknesses based on our respective areas of expertise. If I learned nothing else during that discussion, it was that candor is absolutely critical. There is no benefit to pursue protectionism. If we’re in denial about what is accurate, we will not see clearly what we need to improve—and we’ll just get called on it sooner rather than later and have weaker structures to deal with our very real problems.

I noticed also that it was helpful to create “thought experiments” and “use cases” to see how questions get answered in the university hierarchy. If there is no clear direction for the flow of questions, then that means that there is something missing in the bureaucratic structure.

Also, in questions about whether certain student needs get met, it’s important to not brush off concerns by saying that –well, students just don’t access that resource that we offer. There has to be a strong outreach to make sure students are aware of resources and that much of what they need gets delivered to them-even without their direct asking.