Accreditation committee report

March 14, 2005

Accreditation committee report submitted to campus

The report by the visiting team of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' (WASC) educational effectiveness review has been submitted to the campus and is available online.

WASC contact information:

985 Atlantic Ave.
Suite 100
Alameda, CA 94501
(510) 748-9001

The report makes a number of thought-provoking suggestions about campus organization, undergraduate, graduate and professional education, and concludes that "the opportunities before the University of California-Santa Cruz far outweigh its challenges and suggest an extremely exciting future for an institution long viewed as an important trailblazer in American higher education."

"The campus appreciates the hard work of the visiting committee and their thoughtful recommendations," said Vice Provost William Ladusaw, the campus's accreditation liaison officer. "We look forward to further campus discussion on how to implement some of them to enhance our educational effectiveness and academic planning as we move forward."

The committee of eight distinguished academic administrators visited UCSC February 2-4 in the closing phase of the review. They consulted with administrators and faculty leadership to assess UCSC's commitment to "educational effectiveness" as defined in the WASC criteria for review and discussed several strategic issues with the campus leadership.

Educational effectiveness within the framework of the review involves two things: whether students are successfully achieving the learning objectives of UCSC's programs and whether the institution has good processes for assessing and improving its effectiveness.

Now that the report has been completed, the next step is a June 2005 meeting of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' Commission to approve the full review, taking action on UCSC's reaccreditation.

All four-year colleges and universities in the United States must be reaccredited periodically to earn federal support for student scholarships, loans, and grants. One of six regional associations, WASC reviews educational institutions in California, Guam, and Hawaii. Its recommendations for accreditation are reported to the U.S. Department of Education. UCSC was last accredited in 1994.

Additional information is available online at planning.ucsc.edu/wasc/

Related links:

• January 31, 2005, Currents Online: Accreditation committee to meet with administration, faculty

• January 26, 2004, Currents Online: Accreditation team will visit UCSC for review on February 4-6

• February 16, 2002, Currents Online: Accreditation team visits UCSC

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