Learning Resources

Abstract: Institutional accreditation has served higher education and the public interest well for more than a century, but now its purposes are changing quickly and dramatically. Accreditation began as a voluntary, nongovernmental peer review process internally managed by colleges and universities to determine if schools met threshold tests of academic quality and to facilitate institutional self-improvement. However, it has increasingly become the primary mechanism for assuring policy makers and the public that institutions of higher education are academically sound and offer studentsa valuable product. This is a trend that seems likely to continue. As federal support for higher education grows and the importance of postsecondary credentials plays a larger and larger role in individual and national well-being, the demands placed on accreditors are likely to increase. Indeed, a quick overview of the history of accreditation and the federal government illustrates that the use of accreditors to pursue specific federal policy objectives is not a new development, but rather a trend that has been underway for a long time.

Abstract: The Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQIP) addresses the conflict between assurance and improvement in accreditation by providing an innovative process that focuses institutions on improving process quality and performance while also generating solid evidence that they meet accreditation standards. AQIP consciously infuses quality concepts and techniques into accreditation by focusing an institution’s attention on itself as a quality system that can improve its own operation and performance.