Institutions must gear up to face new challenges, such as ensuring campus security, keeping up with technology and maintaining quality.
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While graduation and job placement rates, as well as course completions and licensure rates are traditional measures of accountability, much more goes into assessing effectiveness at colleges and universities. Issues such as the quality of teaching and leadership, as well as appropriate academic and student support services, adequate financial and physical resources, and measurable student learning outcomes — or what we expect students to know when they graduate — are all components of the assessment of quality examined during the accreditation process.
Though institutions with smaller enrollments often have more difficulty meeting established standards because of limited resources (fiscal and personnel), the issues are not theirs alone. Reductions in state budgets have resulted in increases in tuition at both public and private institutions in order to ensure the maintenance of a quality environment for students.
