Loyola has begun the lengthy process of reaffirming its status as an accredited university.
The university receives its accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, one of six regional accrediting institutions, and is required to reaffirm its status every 10 years. The reaffirmation process will be finalized December 2006.
To become an accredited university, a school must receive recognition from an accrediting agency or institution confirming that its education programs, services and facilities meet certain standards of acceptability.
The S.A.C.S. has revamped its criteria for accreditation since the last time Loyola underwent the process by requiring institutions to develop a Quality Enhancement Plan – a detailed document describing a university’s specific plans to enhance student learning.
“The S.A.C.S. is clear that the Q.E.P. must be about directly enhancing student learning, not about building more parking lots or improving student retention rates,” John Cornwell, Loyola’s assistant provost for institutional effectiveness and assessment, said.
The university has formed a team of faculty and staff to spearhead the Q.E.P. project.
“[The team] will be gathering a lot of data, and at the same time soliciting ideas from without the university community regarding a possible project we might undertake as our Q.E.P. project,” said University Provost Walter Harris. “So it will involve students and faculty, lots of people coming to the table, and that particular team will guide that effort.”
The completed Q.E.P. will be due to the S.A.C.S. in January of 2006.
For months, the university has been preparing a certification of compliance for the S.A.C.S. This documentation is meant to demonstrate to what extent Loyola judges itself as in compliance with the accrediting institution’s requirements.
Cornwell said he has been hard at work preparing the university’s certification of compliance and coordinating the efforts of different departments. Faculty members from each department have been supplying his office with the required data needed for the S.A.C.S. review.
“It’s been a real effort by the entire faculty,” Cornwell said, “and so far we’ve been able to keep up with our timeline.”
The certification of compliance should be completed by August 2005.
To facilitate the reaffirmation process, the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment has increased the university’s utilization of the Internet as a means to publicly store data. This effort has resulted in redesigned Web sites for each department, as well as a greater department intranet linking financial data and other assessment documents.
In further compliance with S.A.C.S. standards, the university has also begun storing class syllabuses electronically.
“The S.A.C.S. has said that various class syllabi should be available to the public,” Cornwell said. “In the past that meant we put them all in a filing cabinet. But now students can access them through LORA or through other outlets on the university’s Web site.”
Once the compliance certification is completed, an offsite committee will review the university’s documentation, assess the data provided and advise the university by making observations and raising questions. An S.A.C.S. representative will visit the university next February.
Thomas Stevenson can be reached at [email protected].
