AALE (American Academy for Liberal Education)

The ability of the AALE (American Academy for Liberal Education) to accredit is questionable right now, because the U.S. Dept. of Education has received a recommendation from an advisory committee that it suspend recognition of this program as an accreditor. Evidently the problem is related to whether or not the AALE requires institutions to adequately demonstrate how they assess student learning. The president of the AALE, Jeffrey Wallin, has been quoted in articles saying that they have no problem meeting any requirements from the Dept. of Education, and that they do pay a lot of attention to assessment. They hope to resolve the issue soon.

For more information, see the article entitles "Advisory Committee to U.S. Education Dept. Penalizes Accreditor of Conservative Colleges," by Burton Bollag, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/9/2005 (subscription required)--http://www.chronicle.com .

I know of a couple of institutions that have AALE accreditation, and these institutions indeed did put a lot of work into assessment efforts prior to earning their AALE accreditations. It will be interesting to see how this problem is resolved, and how quickly.

Middle States annual conference

I recently returned from attending the annual conference held by the Middle States Association--always a valuable conference. My institution went through its ten-year re-accreditation visit last year, and received our results that we are fully re-accredited for the next ten years. So it was truly a pleasure to go to the conference this year, just to learn and plan for the future, rather than feeling pressured to find every possible tip to help us attain re-accredited status!

Middle States will be issuing a new version of standards in early 2006--these are not new standards, but the new document will contain some revisions of wording, especially within the context sections.

Of course I learned lots of other things as well, which I'll be posting on the blog as time permits. I've recently cleared the blog of older, outdated postings too!