Middle States Reaccreditation — The Basics
What’s Middle States? John Jay is going through its ten-year review by the Middle States Commission of Higher Education, our regional accrediting authority. A team of evaluators will be on campus from April 21 to April 24, 2013, to meet as many people as possible in order to determine if our Self-Study is an accurate assessment of our performance against fourteen standards. If successful, we will be reaccredited.
What’s the Self-Study and who produced it? The Self-Study is a self-evaluation of how we have performed in all the vital functions of a higher education institution, and it points to plans for the future. Approximately 100 faculty, staff, administrators, and students worked on six committees that produced working drafts for the various standards.
Who are the evaluators? They are nine volunteers from Middle States member institutions that resemble John Jay in important ways; the team members are faculty, staff, and administrators, some of whom specialize in areas defined by the standards. The Team Chair is Robert Bogomolny, President of the University of Baltimore, Maryland state system.
What are the Fourteen Standards? You can see the standards at a glance on the John Jay Middle States website and much more comprehensively on the Middle States website. Essentially, the standards concern planning and assessment in the broad context of our Mission.
What’s this got to do with me? A great deal, if you are interested in making John Jay the best it can be. It is important to the College and to the Middle States team that everyone be familiar with the evaluation and planning reflected in the Self-Study. As a member of the John Jay community, the Self-Study is about what you do at the College. Please review the Self-Study on Inside John Jay or on the Jay Stop. Outside their scheduled meetings, the visiting team will be talking informally many people—faculty, students, and staff—to learn about the College and to experience first-hand the situation described in the Self-Study. Find out more: please come back to this site so you can knowledgeably interact with the visiting team, should you be called on to do so.
Why do we have accreditation? To provide a measure of accountability to the federal government that spends about $150 billion annually on financial aid for students, and to prospective students and parents who bear much of the cost of higher education. Public institutions especially have to be concerned with the effectiveness of the education they offer, in and out of the classroom. We at John Jay embrace the reaccreditation review as one of the best opportunities we have to improve and to set the tone for continuous improvement.
9/9/12
