Resource Released for Using the CAS Standards for Regional Accreditation

The Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) is pleased to announce the release of a new resource on using the CAS functional area standards for regional accreditation. This resource was written by Lucas Schalewski, Kathleen Evans, Vicki Wise, Matthew D. Pistilli, Gavin Henning, Kristan Skendall, and Laura Dean.

CAS, a consortium composed of over 40 collaborating professional associations representing over 115,000 professionals in higher education, has developed standards for 47 functional areas and 3 cross-functional teams, and rooted them in the scholarship and work conducted within their respective fields. Standards delineate expectations for practitioners and educators in related functional areas, and are published in the 2019 CAS Professional Standards for Higher Education (10th ed), with subsequent updates released online.

In this White Paper on using CAS functional area standards for regional accreditation, the authors point out that while “many institutions have built program review processes around CAS, few consider the benefit of using CAS self-studies for regional accreditation reports.” This resource provides an overview of how to use CAS functional area standards for regional accreditation.

CAS President Dan Bureau (The University of Memphis) commented on how the points raised by the authors illuminate the utility of the standards: “This white paper provides a great overview of why to use CAS for accreditation. Even more importantly it is most useful to those involved in accreditation and provides a number of recommendations that help the reader apply CAS in a very intentional way that aligns with the objectives of accreditation. Accreditation is on the mind of every college and university senior leader. Using CAS Standards helps institutions to create programs and services that contribute to the important goals of student learning, development, and success, which in turn fulfills their responsibility to accrediting bodies.”

CAS is pleased to release this resource to assist practitioners in using functional area standards for regional accreditation.

This new resource is now available at: https://store.cas.edu/using-cas-functional-area-standards-for-regional-accreditation/

Please direct all questions and inquiries to the CAS Executive Director ([email protected]).