Get Our Extension
Select Wikiz in another Language
Settings
A
A
Text Highlights
Notes/Citations
Edit on Wikipedia

Share This Article

About Wikiz About Us Cookies Policy Terms & Services Privacy Policy Contact Contact us Enjoying Wikipedia Content? DONATE TO WIKIPEDIA
Enjoying Wikipedia Content? DONATE TO WIKIPEDIA

Higher Learning Commission

From Wikipedia, in a visual modern way
Higher Learning Commission
AbbreviationHLC
PredecessorNorth Central Association of Colleges and Schools
Formation1895
PurposeHigher education accreditation
HeadquartersChicago, Illinois
Region served
Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming
Main organ
Board of Directors
AffiliationsCHEA
Websitehlcommission.org

The Higher Learning Commission (HLC) is an institutional accreditor in the United States. It has historically accredited post-secondary education institutions in the central United States: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The headquarters of the organization is in Chicago, Illinois.

The United States Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation recognize the commission as an institutional accreditor; it was previously a regional accreditor.[1][2] HLC grew out of the higher education division of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA), which dissolved in 2014.[3]

Discover more about Higher Learning Commission related topics

Higher education accreditation in the United States

Higher education accreditation in the United States

Higher education accreditation in the United States is a peer review process by which the validity of degrees and credits awarded by higher education institutions is assured. It is coordinated by accreditation commissions made up of member institutions. It was first undertaken in the late 19th century by cooperating educational institutions, on a regional basis.

Arizona

Arizona

Arizona is a state in the Southwestern United States. It is the 6th-largest and the 14th-most-populous of the 50 states. Its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona is part of the Four Corners region with Utah to the north, Colorado to the northeast, and New Mexico to the east; its other neighboring states are Nevada to the northwest, California to the west and the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California to the south and southwest.

Arkansas

Arkansas

Arkansas is a landlocked state in the South Central United States. It is bordered by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma to the west. Its name is from the Osage language, a Dhegiha Siouan language, and referred to their relatives, the Quapaw people. The state's diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the densely forested land in the south known as the Arkansas Timberlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta.

Colorado

Colorado

Colorado is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains. Colorado is the eighth most extensive and 21st most populous U.S. state. The 2020 United States census enumerated the population of Colorado at 5,773,714, an increase of 14.80% since the 2010 census.

Illinois

Illinois

Illinois is a state in the Midwestern United States. It shares borders with Wisconsin to its north, Iowa to its northwest, Missouri to its southwest, Kentucky to its south, and Indiana to its east. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other metropolitan areas include Peoria and Rockford, as well as Springfield, its capital. Of the fifty U.S. states, Illinois has the fifth-largest gross domestic product (GDP), the sixth-largest population, and the 25th-largest land area.

Indiana

Indiana

Indiana is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th state on December 11, 1816. It is bordered by Lake Michigan to the northwest, Michigan to the north and northeast, Ohio to the east, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the south and southeast, and the Wabash River and Illinois to the west.

Iowa

Iowa

Iowa is a state in the upper Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River and Big Sioux River to the west. It is bordered by six states: Wisconsin to the northeast, Illinois to the east and southeast, Missouri to the south, Nebraska to the west, South Dakota to the northwest, and Minnesota to the north.

Kansas

Kansas

Kansas is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka, and its largest city is Wichita. Kansas is a landlocked state bordered by Nebraska to the north; Missouri to the east; Oklahoma to the south; and Colorado to the west. Kansas is named after the Kansas River, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native Americans who lived along its banks. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the (south) wind" although this was probably not the term's original meaning. For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison.

Michigan

Michigan

Michigan is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. It is bordered by Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the southwest, Indiana and Ohio to the south, and Lakes Superior, Huron, and Erie to the north and east. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly 97,000 sq mi (250,000 km2), Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the largest by area east of the Mississippi River. Its capital is Lansing, and its largest city is Detroit. Metro Detroit is among the nation's most populous and largest metropolitan economies. Its name derives from a gallicized variant of the original Ojibwe word ᒥᓯᑲᒥ, meaning "large water" or "large lake".

Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is the 12th largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd most populous, with over 5.75 million residents. Minnesota is home to western prairies, now given over to intensive agriculture; deciduous forests in the southeast, now partially cleared, farmed, and settled; and the less populated North Woods, used for mining, forestry, and recreation. Roughly a third of the state is covered in forests, and it is known as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes" for having over 14,000 bodies of fresh water covering at least ten acres. More than 60% of Minnesotans live in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area, known as the "Twin Cities", the state's main political, economic, and cultural hub. With a population of about 3.7 million, the Twin Cities is the 16th largest metropolitan area in the U.S. Other minor metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas in the state include Duluth, Mankato, Moorhead, Rochester, and St. Cloud.

Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and the third most populous in the United States after New York City and Los Angeles. With a population of 2,746,388 in the 2020 census, it is also the most populous city in the Midwest. As the seat of Cook County, the city is the center of the Chicago metropolitan area, one of the largest in the world.

Council for Higher Education Accreditation

Council for Higher Education Accreditation

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a United States organization of degree-granting colleges and universities. It identifies its purpose as providing national advocacy for academic quality through accreditation in order to certify the quality of higher education accrediting organizations, including regional, faith-based, private, career, and programmatic accrediting organizations.

Criteria for accreditation

The Higher Learning Commission has five major criteria for accreditation.[4] They are: (1) Mission, (2) Ethics, (3) Teaching and Learning: Quality, Resources, and Support, (4) Teaching and Learning: Evaluation and Improvement, and (5) Resources, Planning, and Institutional Effectiveness.

Criticism

In 2009, the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education (OIG-ED) criticized the Higher Learning Commission's oversight of for-profit colleges and recommended that the agency consider "limiting, suspending, or terminating the organization's status."[5] Although the OIG reaffirmed their recommendation that the department consider sanctions for the HLC the following year, adding critical reviews of HLC's accreditation of American InterContinental University and The Art Institute of Colorado[6], the Department of Education did not withdraw or limit HLC's accreditation authority. Six years later in 2015, the OIG-ED again criticized HLC this time with an audit on the review process the HLC used while considering colleges' proposals for competency-based credentials.[7]

Academic Quality Improvement Program

The Academic Quality Improvement Program is a set of policies and procedures that institutions can follow in order to maintain accreditation by the HLC.[8]

History

The Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQIP) was developed as the "Academic Quality Improvement Project" beginning in 1999 by Stephen Spangehl at the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) (then the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools).[9] The project was funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.[10] The project was inspired by Dr. Spangehl's experience as an examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and sought to apply the principles of Total quality management to higher education.

AQIP originally focused on 9 categories of activity that lent themselves to self-assessment and continuous improvement,[11] improved and refined in 2008.[12] The guidelines identified ten core principles—Focus, Involvement, Leadership, Learning, People, Collaboration, Agility, Foresight, Information, and Integrity—that high performing organizations use to guide their operations, and required institutions to develop their own projects to apply those principles tho their own activity and measure their success.

The program took a collaborative approach with "Strategy Forums" where groups of institutions shared their insights about the "Action Projects" they undertook to address various challenges. The records of Action Projects were stored in an online network that other participants could access and use as guidance for future improvements. At the end of the review cycle institutions were responsible for preparing a "Systems Portfolio" that required them to answer specific question about processes, results, and improvements for each of the 9 AQIP categories.

Modern Form

Known as the "AQIP Pathway", AQIP was one of three options (including Standard and Open Pathways) that institutions accredited by the Higher Learning Commission were able to pursue for reaccreditation.[13] Dr. Linnea Stenson served as director of the program from 2015 to 2021.[14]

In order to elect participation in AQIP,[15] institutions were required to be accredited for ten years and to have demonstrated established foundations in "expected practice" under traditional pathways. Numerous factors might have made an institution ineligible for the optional pathway, including recent change in control, substantive change,[16] sanction, monitoring, or if the accreditor had serious concerns about the institution's conduct or commitment to required accreditation activities.

At the end of academic year 2019–2020, HLC officially phased out AQIP as an accreditation pathway,[17] leaving only Standard and Open Pathways as re-accreditation options.[18]

Source: "Higher Learning Commission", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, January 5th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Learning_Commission.

Enjoying Wikiz?

Enjoying Wikiz?

Get our FREE extension now!

Download Extension

Further Reading

Southern Association of Colleges and Schools

Capella University

Dakota State University

American InterContinental University

Western Governors University

Cincinnati Christian University

Community College of Denver

Colorado Technical University

West Shore Community College

Hannibal–LaGrange University

Northern College (England)

Commission for Academic Accreditation (United Arab Emirates)

Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community College
See also
  • AdvancED (accrediting agency for primary and secondary schools that evolved from the NCA).
References
  1. ^ "Accreditation in the United States: regional and national institutional accrediting agencies". United States Department of Education. Archived from the original on February 4, 2019. Retrieved February 4, 2019.
  2. ^ "Regional accrediting organizations 2009-2010". Council for Higher Education Accreditation. Archived from the original on August 31, 2009. Retrieved November 1, 2009.
  3. ^ "About the Higher Learning Commission". Higher Learning Commission. Archived from the original on February 4, 2019. Retrieved February 4, 2019.
  4. ^ "Criteria for accreditation" (PDF). Higher Learning Commission (Alpha revision ed.). March 2018. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 4, 2019. Retrieved February 4, 2019.
  5. ^ Kelderman, Eric (December 17, 2009). "Inspector General warns accreditor over online college, raising fears among for-profit institutions". Government. Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on October 8, 2018. Retrieved February 4, 2019.
  6. ^ Kelderman, Eric (May 27, 2010). "Inspector General keeps the pressure on a regional accreditor". Government. Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on October 8, 2018. Retrieved February 4, 2019.
  7. ^ Fain, Paul (October 5, 2015). "Caution on competency". Assessment and Accountability. Inside Higher Ed. Archived from the original on February 4, 2019. Retrieved February 4, 2019.
  8. ^ "AQIP Pathway Overview". Higher Learning Commission. Retrieved September 26, 2017.
  9. ^ "About the Higher Learning Commission". Higher Learning Commission. Retrieved September 26, 2017.
  10. ^ D., Spangehl, Stephen (April 1, 2012). "AQIP and Accreditation: Improving Quality and Performance". 40 (3). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  11. ^ "Principles and Categories for Improving Academic Quality" (PDF). Higher Learning Commission. 2005.
  12. ^ "AQIP Categories and Items - 2008 Revision" (PDF). Higher Learning Commission. Retrieved September 26, 2017.
  13. ^ "AQIP Pathway - Pathways - Accreditation Processes".
  14. ^ "Staff Liaisons | About HLC". www.hlcommission.org.
  15. ^ "Choosing a Pathway | Accreditation". www.hlcommission.org.
  16. ^ "Institutional Change - Monitoring - Accreditation Processes".
  17. ^ https://download.hlcommission.org/HLCResourceGuide_INF.pdf
  18. ^ "Choosing a Pathway | Accreditation". www.hlcommission.org. Retrieved June 4, 2021.
External links
Categories

The content of this page is based on the Wikipedia article written by contributors..
The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence & the media files are available under their respective licenses; additional terms may apply.
By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use & Privacy Policy.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization & is not affiliated to WikiZ.com.