Members of the Higher Learning Commission to visit the campus April 15-17; will meet with various groups
Kim Schmitz
News Editor
As part of the College’s reaccreditation process, members of the Higher Learning Commission will visit Wooster next week. The group will be here from April 15-17, and will make an effort to better understand the way the College is run.
Meetings will be held with various groups campus groups that have been selected by the Higher Learning Commission. The selections were made based on the report of a self-study that the College has written over the last two years.
The Higher Learning Commission is in the process of reviewing this report. The visiting committee will also write its own report, which the College will receive sometime this coming fall. Criteria such as student success and competence of faculty and staff are quantified and compared. However, another accomplishment that the College must highlight is improvements over the 10 years since its last accreditation.
The members of the Higher Learning Commission will certainly want to converse with students while they are here, but some of their questions may occur outside of meetings. Anne Nurse, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, and one of the chairs of the College’s self-study, said that they may want to approach students in Lowry or elsewhere around campus to ask them about their experiences at Wooster. Nurse also said that she hopes students will be open and honest.
Accreditation is the certificate of competency that colleges and universities need in order to receive federal grants and financial aid in order for students to be able to transfer credits. The Higher Learning Commission — located in Chicago — reviews almost all schools in the Midwest, and reports to the Department of Education. The visiting committee will consist of five people.
In addition to Nurse, Gary Gillund, associate professor of psychology, and Ellen Falduto, chief information and planning officer, were co-chairs of the self-study. The study also made use of a steering committee, made up of five faculty and staff members, who each led a working group in a different area of criteria.
The five sets of criteria that the Higher Learning Commission evaluates are Mission (to ensure the College has and follows a mission statement); Integrity (to determine if the College is ethical in its practices); Teaching (at an appropriate level and at a wide range to coincide with the mission); Resources and Planning; and Assessment.
“[The report] addresses this criteria and gives the evidence that shows that we believe that we’re meeting the criteria,” Nurse said. “But it also makes suggestions for the future and it points out places where we’re working on it but we’re not perfect yet.”
The chairs of the report tried to include as many voices in the document as possible. From working groups designed for the reaccreditation process to existing organizations such as campus council, to comments from students and others, Nurse is proud of the holistic nature of the review they have written.
“Our accreditation is obviously very important,” she said, “but more than that, we see this as an opportunity to think about the next ten years at Wooster, and building on the successes of the last ten years.”