About Accreditation
The HLC Accreditation and Self-Study Process
As a university, we voluntarily sought accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association (NCA) in 2006-2007. The NCA, existing since 1895, is an organization comprised of member schools from nineteen states, from Minnesota to Oklahoma and from West Virginia to Arizona. Within the NCA, the HLC accredits organizations as a whole. Besides assessing formal educational activities, it evaluates such things as governance and administration, financial stability, admissions and student services, institutional resources, student learning, institutional effectiveness, and relationships with internal and external constituencies. Each accreditation process requires the university seeking accreditation to conduct an evaluative self-study as well as participate in a site visit by an HLC-sponsored accreditation team.
The HLC has designed the accreditation process to achieve its mission:
Serving the common good by assuring and advancing the quality of higher education.
While the focus of an accreditation visit historically has been on the self-study report we generate and the response to that report from the HLC, the current accreditation process points to a different focus: self-reflection, evaluation, and improvement. The self-study process afforded us the opportunity to collectively come to understand what we, as a university, are doing, how well we are doing it, why we are doing it, and what we can do better. In keeping with the new criteria for accreditation, the self-study report did not rely on description, but rather on data and information-based analysis, evaluation, and recommendations for improvement.
* For more information, see http://www.ncahlc.org/download/2003Overview.pdf from which the italicized text on this page originated. Page 10 of that document contains a very useful FAQ section detailing the purpose, value, and particulars of accreditation.