Development of an Accreditation Assessment Survey

Every institution of higher education in the United States must, in order to award degrees and financial aid, be recognized by an accrediting organization under the guidelines and oversight of the US Department of Education. This process of recognition is known as accreditation. Via an investigation of the world of accreditation in higher education, it became immediately evident that institutions are not currently equipped to abbreviate the timelines without changes in their current business processes as they relate to accreditation visits. More specifically, the process of institutional assessment stands as a negative aspect to accreditation existing as a superfluous expenditure of time and money. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to build a model questionnaire matching against the semantics of the five criteria as delineated by the Higher Learning Commission for accreditation by utilizing the components of each criterion.