Mississippi State University has reaffirmed its accreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, fulfilling more than 400 different requirements on all aspects of the university.
“Accreditation determines the status of the university on a national level,” said Associate Provost Jerry Gilbert.
By receiving the certification of accreditation, students, faculty and staff members are assured that the university has met the standards of an institution of this size, said President Charles Lee.
To ensure that the university was meeting the SACS requirements, more than 200 people helped participate in MSU’s two-year self-study. Physics professor Leslie Bauman directed the self-study and authored the post-study report submitted to SACS committee members.
“Thirteen committees were formed and both students and faculty members were involved,” she said.
After the initial visit by officials early in 2003, the university was found to be in violation of 17 different criteria, Bauman said. One year later, six of the faulty areas had been corrected. A monitoring report was issued in September and in December, reaccreditation was confirmed.
“It is an expectation that we fulfill these requirements,” said Lee. “It is our badge to say to the students, ‘Here are the standards, and we have met or exceeded those standards.'”
Lee told members of the Faculty Senate that he had “never lived in a state with as much emphasis on accreditation as Mississippi” during a meeting last Friday.
Although most major universities are accredited, some smaller colleges are not able to maintain the high standards and that sometimes has an impact on students.
Wood College in Mathiston lost their accreditation several years ago and had to be shut down, Gilbert said. That created a problem for students who took classes at Wood before transferring to Mississippi State.
“Once they were put on probation, we no longer accepted the credits from that school,” Gilbert said.
However, MSU has implemented programs to ensure that a loss of accreditation never happens here.
In the next 10 years, when the university must undergo reevaluation, faculty members are performing regular self-checks to maintain the standards of accreditation.
“We call this ‘quality assurance,'” Gilbert said. “Accreditation happens on dual levels,” he said. Individual departments and programs have to undergo accreditation “so they are making ongoing improvements which help the university as a whole.”
These regular self-checks could mean less work for the university in 2012-the year Bauman said preparations for another round of reaccreditation will begin.