Reaccreditation self-study well under way

The College is currently in the process of reaccreditation, a process that all institutions of higher learning must undergo every 10 years.  The New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) performs the reaccreditation; a team from that organization will visit campus in the fall of 2011 to complete their study.

“The question is not so much necessarily whether we will be accredited, but whether there will be particular areas of concern,” said Susan Campbell, Dean of Planning and Assessment and director of the College’s self-study.

“[NEASC] has a very specific outline for what we are required to submit,” said Campbell. “That includes measuring ourselves against 11 different standards. We have to write a self-study that addresses how well we think we are doing in all of those areas … where we think our strengths and weakness are.”

The self-study addresses the following standards: mission and purposes, planning and evaluation, organization and governance, the academic program, faculty, students, library and other information resources, physical and technological resources, financial resources, public disclosure, and integrity.

According to Campbell, NEASC has informed the College that serious attention will be paid not only to the undergraduate college, which has been the focus of all the previous reviews, but also to the College’s other degree-granting entities — the Language Schools, the C.V. Starr Schools Abroad, the Bread Loaf School of English and the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a graduate school of the College.

“One thing that we are trying to figure out how to do well now that wasn’t so relevant in the past is institutional integration,” said Campbell.   “The undergraduate college is the primary focus of the institution, but we also have significant, important and high-quality programs in very different parts of the world with somewhat different missions.”

The self-study process began about a year ago, after having been postponed for two years in order to let the process of acquiring the Monterey Institute play out. In the fall of 2009, the steering committee and subcommittees were organized and began to meet to form plans and outlines for evaluating the College.

“We meet once a week and have been since last year and will be through this semester,” said Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Research Kathy Skubikowski.  Skubikowski is also a member of the committee on faculty and academic standards.

At this point, faculty members are deeply involved in the reaccreditation process.

“You would be hard-put to find a faculty member who doesn’t have some involvement in it or know about it,” said Skubikowski.

NEASC examines institutions in a structured way. The organization “requires that we not only identify our challenges and strengths but that we say what specifically we are going to do to maintain those strengths and address those challenges,” said Campbell.

“Sometimes [data collection] involves some very basic information about the institution, but it can also involve more focused attempts to gather data on things that we think matter and that we want to look at,” Campbell continued.  “It is not one big data collection effort, it is the compilation of a whole lot of different data collection efforts.”

For example, a class on survey methodology taught by Professor of Sociology and Religion Burke Rochford aided in the reaccreditation process last year.

“As part of that class they do a pretty large scale survey of about 200 students every year on different topics depending on what the students in the class want to do,” said Campbell.  “[Rochford] met with me before the class started and asked if there was any way that [the class] could be helpful to the reaccreditation process and I said ‘Yes, please!’”

The class included questions about the Commons and students’ experiences with and evaluations of the Commons, an initiative about which Campbell said the College has never really collected statistical evidence.

The class also collected survey data from students about diversity, stress and workload.  They made presentations at the end of the semester, submitted a written report and gave Campbell their data file, allowing the reaccreditation committee to perform more data analyses.

“The students seemed really pleased to be gathering data that they knew would be useful beyond the class,” said Campbell.

The reaccreditation committee also has a large body of survey data that is routinely collected from students, including the annual senior survey and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program survey submitted to first-years during orientation.

Student involvement

The self-study of student life will most directly affect the student body.

“The bulk of our report will be focused on the kinds of student services we provide and what changes might need to be made in those areas,” said Gus Jordan, Dean of Students and chair of the subcommittee on standards of student life. “I suspect a focus on three areas: the Commons system, diversity and concerns about stress levels.”

The committee on student standards will be looking at many facets of student life.  They will address the admissions process, the financial aid process and all of the services available to students, including athletics, health services and career services.

“The self-study is prompting some departments to do more formal thinking about ways they can measure their effectiveness,” said Jordan.  “In the changing education scene that we exist in, we are recognizing that we need more objective measures of measuring how effective our services are.”

The self-study will include much information from ongoing studies on campus. For example, the English department, along with the English departments of several other schools that have been similarly funded by the Teagle Foundation, has been conducting research on progress in writing skills.  Even before the process of reaccreditation began, they had been studying the progress of about 45 students by looking at writing samples and conducting interviews.

The committee on faculty and academic standards studied members of the Class of 2010’s development as writers during their four years on campus. A small group of English department faculty members read through their first-year papers with a rubric the committee had developed to evaluate desirable features of writing.

“There was significant growth overall,” said Skibikowski, “and most importantly, writing improved significantly from the first first-year seminar paper to the last.  Progress plateaued in the second semester.”

“The thing that is most interesting is the feedback loop,” said Skubikowski.  “We revised the rhetorical goals of a first-year seminar.  One of the areas that didn’t grow significantly was the capacity to form an interesting thesis.”

As a response to this observation, the committee moved to much more heavily emphasize this writing skill in the rhetorical concerns of the first-year seminar.
Campbell emphasized the importance of disseminating the results of the self study to the entire College community.

This will occur “probably very early in the spring term,” she said. “At that point it will be considered technically a draft in the sense that we will still have the opportunity to make any changes, additions, or revisions that we think are appropriate based on feedback from the community.”

Students will be minimally involved in this process until the draft is released, at which point the community’s input — particularly student input — will be strongly desired.

“I’m anxious to get students involved in the process soon,” said Jordan. “We might discover that we have missed an area of concern. … I’m hopeful that by the time we hit the end of spring, students will broadly feel a sense of connection to the process and that they have had opportunities to contribute.”

Jordan plans to hold forums to involve the Student Government Association and the Community Council in the revision process.

The NEASC team’s visit

Once the community has reviewed the self-study, it will be sent to NEASC in the fall of 2011.  At that point, a review team will visit campus.  Skubikowski served on a review team last year, so she has some insight into the process.

“They will be a group of five or six people from schools like Middlebury and the president of another college will head that committee,” said Skubikowski. “They will arrive on campus armed with questions. They’ll go around and talk to not just the people who wrote the report, but they’ll also have all sorts of open meetings with students and faculty. They are looking to find information that … corroborates what they have read in the report, gives a wrinkle to it, complicates it or helps them understand it better.”

The Vermont campus is not the only location affiliated with the College that will receive visitors as part of the reaccreditation process.  According to Campbell, NEASC will send “a small subset” of the review team abroad, perhaps two or three members of the team that will come to Vermont in the fall.  These reviewers will visit the Bread Loaf School of English, the Language Schools, one of the Schools Abroad and the Monterey Institute.

“All of those people gather back here on campus,” said Campbell. “So they will be looking at the undergraduate college but also putting together everything they have learned from their visits elsewhere.”

Before they leave campus, the NEASC team will give an open presentation to the community with their preliminary findings.

“The best case scenario is that they find sufficient evidence … that we are doing everything we are supposed to be doing and doing it well, and that we have identified our own weaknesses and have plans to deal with them — and they say ‘We’ll see you in 10 years,’” said Campbell.

According to Skubikowski, there have been cases at other schools in which the review team decided to return sooner to make sure adequate progress was being made.

Larger implications of the reaccreditation process

The NEASC reaccreditation process, though lengthy and time-consuming, has broad institutional implications that will greatly benefit the College in the long run, say those involved in the process.

“You get involved and often forget to step back. NEASC is giving us the opportunity to step back — it’s forcing us to take a step back,” said Skubikowski.

“We are really changing our notion of what the process of reaccreditation means,” said Jordan. “Whereas it used to be that every 10 years you go through this whole thing then it all disappears, I think that now we will be in a continuous evaluation process. … We need to be more attentive year by year as to how we are doing. Many offices in student life already do that internally. We just need to systematize that.”
Campbell echoed Jordan’s views regarding the larger, thematic implications of the reaccreditation process.

“This is an opportunity for the entire community to take a look at the projections we make and comment on those, on the direction the institution is going and about how we feel about that as a community,” said Campbell.  “This is part of a broader national movement pushing for assessment and accountability.  We will provide evidence not only that we hire excellent faculty and we have very well qualified students, but that we also have some process in place for actually assessing the degree to which students in general achieve the goals we set for them.

“We are starting to ask more nuanced questions about what exactly students are learning and where they might not be developing their skills to the degree that we would want,” Campbell continued. This means thinking about “what we can do about that in terms of enhancing the curriculum, refining our teaching, or whatever it might be. That’s new in terms of NEASC’s expectations and new for us as an institution.”

Jordan highlighted the central role the student experience plays in this process.

“We want to directly support the students in their work life and social life and make sure they feel connected to that process,” he said.

Students, faculty and staff can expect to see the effects of this largely behind-the-scenes project in coming months.