Accreditation 101
FAQs about the March 2022 Site Visit
Institutional accreditation is an evaluation process for colleges and universities that provides quality assurance. Although many countries have a government office that directly oversees accreditation reviews, in the case of the United States, the Department of Education has delegated this role to a group of official accrediting associations that facilitate a rigorous peer-review process. Earning accreditation functions as a type of certification or license for the institution that strengthens the value of the degrees its students earn. Importantly, only those colleges and universities that are accredited by USDOE-sanctioned associations may qualify for federal grants and loans to students, including federal financial aid.
Note: It is also possible for individual degree programs to earn accreditation under discipline-specific accreditation bodies. Two of UH West O‘ahu’s programs maintain this type of additional accreditation: the Bachelor of Education (under CAEP) and the Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration (under ACBSP). However, this “Accreditation 101” FAQ resource focuses on institutional accreditation, which is the evaluation of the entire UH West O‘ahu campus.
UH West O‘ahu has been accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) since 1981. This is the primary accrediting association for four-year colleges and universities located in California and Hawai‘i. We last earned reaffirmation of our WSCUC accreditation in 2015, for a seven-year period ending in 2022. We are therefore in the process of seeking renewed affirmation. The first major step was the submission of our Institutional Report for Reaffirmation in June 2021. Further details can be found on our campus accreditation website.
In WSCUC parlance, the Accreditation Visit (aka site visit) is the second and most substantial phase of institutional review. This is the crucial moment in the process when the members of a specially selected evaluation team, having already completed a close inspection of documents and materials over the past eight months, make the trip to the campus under review to conduct a series of interviews and meetings in order to complete their evaluation of the institution in person. (Note: during the coronavirus pandemic, some accreditation visits–including the one for UH Mānoa–have been moved to fully online formats.)
As mentioned above, accreditation is required in order for UH West O‘ahu’s students to remain eligible for federal financial aid, so the stakes are high! Additionally, accreditation informs the wider public, including employers and graduate schools, of the quality and value of students’ degrees and credentials (e.g., certificates). However, the Accreditation Visit is also essential in terms of an institution receiving constructive feedback that allows it to assess and improve its practices and services. Following our Accreditation Visit, the evaluation team will write a report of its findings and recommendations, such as the report completed by the last team in November 2014. The contents of these reports help drive an institution’s priorities and actions as it strives for quality assurance and improvement in the years that follow.
A five-member team of experienced higher education administrators appointed by WSCUC has been evaluating our institution since July 2021. During the March 2022 Accreditation Visit, this team will spend two and a half days on the UH West O‘ahu campus meeting with individuals and groups whom they have identified as possessing the crucial pieces of information the team needs to complete its assessment of our institution. The visit is facilitated by the host institution’s Accreditation Liaison Officer (ALO). Each Accreditation Visit features an open forum for students and another open forum for faculty and staff members. There will also be a three-week period prior to the visit for UH West O‘ahu community members to submit confidential feedback directly to the WSCUC team through a specially designated email account.
The members of the evaluation team are senior administrators selected by WSCUC nearly a year ago. Since the accreditation of institutions of higher education occurs in a peer-evaluation format, the team members actually conduct all of their work as unpaid volunteers. The names and titles of the five team members are as follows:
- Leroy Morishita, President Emeritus, California State University, East Bay
- Fran Horvath, Associate Vice Provost (retired), California State University, Monterey Bay
- Sonny Calderon, Vice President for Academic Affairs, New York Film Academy
- Mary Oling-Sisay, Vice Provost, California State University, San Marcos
- Phillip Doolittle, Executive Vice Chancellor and CFO, University of Massachusetts Global
They will be accompanied by WSCUC Vice President Maureen Maloney, who serves as the designated WSCUC staff liaison for UH West O‘ahu and knows our institution well.
The team’s official on-campus visit will last for two and a half days, whether that takes place in a traditional or modified hybrid format (due to the omicron wave). The visit will run all day on Wednesday, March 2, all day on Thursday, March 3, and the morning of Friday, March 4. The team members will arrive in Kapolei a day or two in advance to get situated and prepare for the visit.
Maintaining and renewing accreditation status is truly a continuous process. Efforts to prepare for the current review cycle commenced as soon as UH West O‘ahu received a set of (commendations and) recommendations as part of the WSCUC Commission’s 2015 awarding of seven years of reaffirmation. Among other things, WSCUC requires institutions to submit annual reports. WSCUC also tasked UH West O‘ahu with submitting a more thorough Interim Report in 2018, in which the institution discussed its efforts to address prior WSCUC recommendations. That Interim Report was in turn accepted by WSCUC in 2019 via an Action Summary that contained yet another set of (commendations and) recommendations. This was followed by WSCUC’s Mid-Cycle Review of UH West O‘ahu in 2019.
The submission of the Institutional Report for Reaffirmation (IRR) in 2021 was thus literally the culmination of years of effort. That key document presented the various measures that UH West O‘ahu had undertaken to implement those multiple sets of recommendations in addition to meeting an assortment of federal requirements and WSCUC standards. Although most of the drafting of the actual IRR was completed by a core writing hui, those efforts were coordinated with the campus’ WSCUC Steering Committee and built upon (a) the comprehensive strategic planning processes led by Chancellor Benham in 2017-2018, (b) feedback from numerous survey participants in 2019, and (c) the efforts of the nine component groups constituted in 2020. In addition to this, there are dozens of faculty members who have participated in the program review and/or learning outcome assessment processes over the past few years. The examples are so numerous that we cannot cover them all here!
See the Daily Schedule for WSCUC Accreditation Visit, March 2 – March 4, 2022.
The WSCUC team specificies the groups and individuals with whom it wants to meet. Some people on campus have therefore already been informed that they will be expected to meet with team members at some point during the visit. (Although the schedule is typically set three weeks before the visit, last-minute requests are not unusual.)
The WSCUC evaluation team will be holding two separate open forums for staff/faculty and students. This is your opportunity to have an open dialogue with the evaluation team. Each forum will be held in Room C-225 in the Student Services Building and will also be broadcast over Zoom via the following links:
- Open Forum for Staff and Faculty: Wednesday, March 2, 2 – 2:45 p.m.
https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/96684456558
Meeting ID: 966 8445 6558
Passcode: uhwopueo - Open Forum for Students: Thursday, March 3, 2 – 2:45 p.m.
https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/96996783395
Meeting ID: 969 9678 3395
Passcode: uhwopueo
Those of you unable to attend your open forum are encouraged to avail yourselves of the opportunity to submit direct, confidential feedback to the WSCUC evaluation team at uhwo@wscuc.org.
The entire campus community will also be invited to attend the culminating exit meeting on the morning of Friday, March 4, at 11:30 a.m. (Zoom option available; details forthcoming). The exit meeting typically lasts 10-15 minutes and consists of the evaluation team reading a sum
The WSCUC accreditation team determines the slate of individuals and groups with whom it will meet. As far as individuals are concerned, this includes the Chancellor, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs among others. Groups that the team has requested to meet with include the Faculty Senate’s Distance Education Committee, the Assessment Committee, and our Academic Advising team. Due to the persistence of the coronavirus pandemic, larger group meetings will take place in a virtual format. Of course, there will also be two separate open forums for students and faculty/staff.
We all exhale and decompress! The last action of the final day of the visit will consist of an exit meeting in which the team provides a summary of its commendations and recommendations to the larger campus community. At this point, the campus community will have a general sense of how the evaluation went but will not yet know what action WSCUC will ultimately take.
The evaluation team departs the institution immediately thereafter and does not engage in discussions regarding its findings. The team continues to work on its final report in the weeks that follow the accreditation visit, typically submitting a draft copy to the institution’s CEO within five weeks, after which point the campus has two weeks to respond with any corrections to factual errors (only). A few weeks after that, the team submits its final report to the WSCUC office and the institution, with the CEO now invited to submit a letter responding to the team’s actual findings.
UH West O‘ahu’s fate will ultimately be decided at a formal three-day WSCUC (quarterly) Commission Meeting in late June in Berkeley, CA. During this meeting, a Commission panel of five or more members will conduct an institutional review that features the live participation of the accreditation team chair, the institutional CEO (i.e., Chancellor Benham), and other UH West O‘ahu representatives. The panel will then engage in closed-session deliberations before forwarding a recommendation to the full Commission. The final stage of the process is the dissemination of an action letter by the Commission, containing the full set of commendations and recommendations as well as a decision on UH West O‘ahu’s accreditation status. On the negative side, there are five possible types of sanctions that WSCUC may impose on institutions, the most severe of which is the termination of accreditation. On the positive side, the most desirable outcome would be the reaffirmation of UH West O‘ahu’s WSCUC accreditation for as long as ten years. That is the pot of gold at the end of the WSCUC rainbow!