At our meeting in March, Cheri Johannes mentioned that the term "regional accreditation" was no longer going to be in use by the Department of Ed and shared the following article:
Most important for accreditation, the sections that modify the timeline that accrediting organizations are to follow to become federally recognized will be effective on July 1, 2021. This change provides more time for accrediting organizations to respond to issues raised by the Department in the course of the review.
A significant feature of these changes is the Department's decision to eliminate reference to "regional" accreditation, now describing regional accrediting organizations as "national" and requiring these accreditors to make public all the states or countries in which they are engaged in accrediting activity.
Cheri, or anyone else -- have you figured out what terminology you are going to use in your various academic policies (e.g. transfer credit policies, etc.) to replace "regionally accredited" so that there is still some distinct way to identify the accrediting organizations that were previously referred to as regional?
When our Associate VP for Academic Affairs reached out to our NWCCU liaison this past spring, he suggested changing our policy to say something like, "we accept credit from institutionally accredited institutions and we evaluate equivalency on a case by case basis." But I have no idea what "institutionally accredited" would actually mean! Has anyone come up with something clearer?
I feel like we're dealing with an "artist formerly known as" type of scenario!
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