Consulting for Accrediting Agencies
Accreditors hold their institutions to set standards, and they, in turn, are held to standards of their own set by the US Department of Education, CHEA, or other external stakeholders, often times with limited resources to meet them.
We provide supplemental support across the work that pursuing and maintaining recognition demands: policy and standards reviews, complaint processing, renewal of recognition, and responding to Civil Investigative Demands. When your team needs added capacity or an outside perspective, we can help.
With Accrediting Agencies
Policy, Procedure, and Standards Review
Standards and policies need regular review, especially after a US Department of Education update or as part of your own evaluation cycle. We facilitate reviews of your policies, procedures, and accreditation standards, drawing out staff concerns and questions of relevance, then help you act on them: drafting new standard language, building templates, and training your team to apply them. When it’s time to bring changes to your stakeholders, we help you present them and fold the feedback back in.
Managing the Complaint Process
When complaints pile up or your team is short-handed, we provide short-term, just-in-time support. Working alongside your staff, we help review, draft, and analyze the complaints you receive, easing the immediate pressure while you sort out a longer-term solution.
US Department of Education and CHEA Recognition
Accreditors undergo their own recognition reviews, and we help you prepare. Whether you’re developing a full petition ahead of your next cycle or responding to a final staff analysis report, we review your standards and policies against the ED and CHEA recognition criteria, flag gaps in implementation or documentation, and work with you on solutions or alternate evidence to close them. We help draft the petition and refine it as staff and Board feedback comes in.
Civil Investigative Demands (CIDs)
If your agency receives a Civil Investigative Demand, we can help you respond. We assist in gathering the necessary documentation, formatting the submission, and advising on the formal response, so you navigate the process and submit something comprehensive and on time. It’s not a situation any accreditor wants to be in, but it’s one we know how to handle.
Ask Us About Accrediting Agencies
Licensing Agencies FAQs
You also work with institutions. Is that a conflict?
We keep our work with accreditors and our work with institutions strictly separate, and the dual perspective is an asset to the work we do with agencies. Because we help institutions interpret and apply standards every day, we can tell you where the standards are ambiguous, difficult to understand, or hard to document, so that they can be clear and enforceable from the start.
Our standards and documents have become hard to navigate. Can you help?
Yes. Standards, policies, and the prompts you give institutions tend to accumulate into something unwieldy over the years, even for your own staff. We help you restructure that content into a logical hierarchy, design it so it reads clearly on the page, and make it accessible, so institutions, reviewers, and the public can all find what they need and understand exactly what you're asking of them.
Is your support short-term or ongoing?
Usually short-term and supplemental. We step in when you need extra capacity, a recognition deadline, a backlog of complaints, a standards review, then step back out. We're a stop-gap and an outside perspective, not a replacement for your staff.
Can we bring you in before our recognition review is due?
Yes, and earlier is better. Reviewing your standards, policies, and documentation well ahead of your petition gives you time to close gaps deliberately rather than scrambling near the deadline.