Every eight years in our region, a Middle States Commission on Higher Education team comes calling to assess progress in each higher education institution. It’s the same in every region of the USA, but with different accrediting bodies, different schedules, different requirements.

Before you welcome the regional accreditation review team to your campus, you are likely to have spent many faculty and staff hours developing the self-study, writing narrative and updating supporting documents, ensuring links to citations, and demonstrating diligence to continuous assessment and improvement.

Hezel Associates assists colleges in self-study development, writing, and editing. The document truly must be prepared and written (and internalized) by members of the institution, but consultants like ours can be truly helpful as an external resource. We keep the steering committee organized and focused on goals and reporting from study groups addressing each standard and their many criteria. Study groups rely on us to provide outside feedback, test the document logic and flow, and ensure consistency across standards and throughout the document. Most important, our team assists in establishing systems of assessment across standards, setting up dashboards of institutional metrics, and enabling more efficient reporting on an annual basis.

In a recent case, Hezel Associates convened a team of consultants to help a client institution approach its very first accreditation self-study and review. Our expert accreditation team worked with the steering committee and all study groups to advise on organizing, writing, and editing the report toward the goal of putting its best foot forward to gain accreditation. All members of the institution completed the project with a much better understanding of the institution’s mission and pathway toward achieving its goals.

Contact us for more details about accreditation consulting.

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