We help you achieve your goals, allowing you to focus on what matters most—your students.
We start each project with an initial consultation, where we learn about your organization’s history, identity, goals, and concerns. There is no pressure.
We’ll talk through how we can support your efforts and will follow up with a customized statement. If everyone agrees it’s a good fit, we get to work.
Services
Accreditation
Accreditation is a massive undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. After working with institutional and programmatic accreditors for 10 years, we know the vocabulary, culture, and people of accreditation. Our team provides guidance, instruction, templates, feedback, recommendations, reasonable timelines, and comprehensive support.
A self-study is at the heart of accreditation, and we have helped build a lot of them. Our team creates project boards that document and track progress on each requirement. We make sure that your questions or concerns are addressed so that your team can meet deadlines and keep moving forward. We’ll help your team think like an evaluator would (because our mentors also regularly serve as evaluators for accrediting agencies!), and we’ll advise you on how to best communicate your institution’s strengths and unique identity while highlighting your mission.
We regularly conduct mock site visits for institutions undergoing initial or renewal of accreditation. This allows your team to have a “dress rehearsal” and identify potential areas of improvement or knowledge gaps that can be addressed before the onsite visit. We’ll share our findings and suggestions with your team immediately afterwards in a workshop to ensure everyone feels prepared.
Several state licensing agencies and accrediting organizations require annual reports and supporting documentation. We can help your institution identify the applicable requirements, complete and review reports, and submit any supporting documentation.
Making a change to your institution or program(s)? We know our way around substantive change applications. We can help you wrangle the data, reports, and exhibits to ensure that all the required materials are submitted efficiently, minimizing additional costs, allocation of resources, and delays.
Strategic Planning
You can’t plan an effective route to your destination if you don’t know the terrain. We can facilitate the development and creation of an effective strategic plan that can function as your roadmap to a healthy, sustainable organization.
We begin by leading a strategic planning workshop with key stakeholders. We’ll walk your team through setting the agenda, reviewing your mission, brainstorming strategic goals, developing action plans, setting performance metrics, evaluating SWOT/risk assessments, and documenting the conversation. We also survey other participants in your organization to seek honest feedback. Collectively, this information forms the basis for the strategic plan.
We compile the collected data into a report for you and your team to review. Next, we work collaboratively to finalize strategic goals, prioritize action plans, and assign resources and timelines for completion. In the end, you will have a comprehensive strategic plan customized to support your mission and goals. We also ensure the strategic plan can be easily updated annually to record your organization’s accomplishments and progress.
State Licensure
State Licensure is the first step (or steps) that any new institution must take before operating in the United States as a higher education entity.
Depending on the scope of your planned activities, you may be subject to a single home-state institutional licensure or a programmatic (state board) approval. If you’re serving students who reside in multiple states, you might be subject to the requirements of every state where students are enrolled. And, yes, this is still true for online institutions. We can help you navigate how your institution’s current and planned activities fit into the state regulatory landscape.
We begin with an analysis of applicable licensure requirements (both institutional and subject-specific), customized for your current and planned instructional activities. For online institutions, this includes a comprehensive regulatory environment report for all 50 states and territories, which identifies applicable licensure, approval, or exemption requirements and an executive summary of enrollment, marketing, and hiring opportunities across the nation. For states where statutory exemptions exist, this report also includes applicable statutes and summary information that can be provided as evidence of compliance to accrediting agencies or other regulatory bodies.
We work with you to identify priorities and develop application materials to meet your goals. Throughout our engagement, we maintain project tools to provide administrator (detailed) and leadership (executive dashboard) level visibility on the state licensure progress. These tools allow us to collaborate with your team to develop and review materials, answer questions, and track needs as each license/approval project progresses.
Over time, the documentation developed becomes a powerful knowledge base from which additional licenses can be more efficiently completed, and often becomes the foundation for narratives and exhibits if the institution chooses to seek accreditation.
Retainer
Licensure and accreditation are not one-and-done activities. State agencies and accrediting organizations expect your self-study efforts to be ongoing and become more robust as your institution grows. We get it—once the big push for accreditation or licensure is over, it’s easy to return to business as usual, but we don’t want your renewal cycle to sneak up on you. Procrastination is not your friend.
We’ll help make sure your organization’s hard work isn’t erased and that all best practices stay top of mind. We created our retainer model after watching many institutions struggle as they started to prepare for their renewal cycles. We’re here to ensure that your institution effectively manages it all it all, including:
Project and Documentation Tracking: We break down compliance requirements into manageable steps. We then work with you to set timelines and project parameters for scheduling required meetings, compiling reports, analyzing data, and collecting documentation. Each required item will be logged, formatted, and stored, so that when you need them, they’re ready to go.
Strategic Planning: We schedule recurring monthly meetings where you can ask us anything. Need to discuss new program development, marketing strategies, admissions questions, strategic initiatives, annual reports, or the best restaurants in your city? We’ve got you. We can help you manage your ambitious ideas and help you stay on track.
Institutional Effectiveness Evaluation: We provide a framework that can guide your efforts in monitoring and measuring all operational efficiencies. Once you have implemented your ambitious ideas, you need to monitor them to determine if they are producing the desired results. This is where a practical institutional effectiveness plan becomes your best friend. We schedule meetings to review your mission and identify all operational areas before identifying goals, key performance indicators, and benchmarks that provide the most meaningful data for your institution.
Updates on Trends and Regulations within Higher Education: The world is rapidly changing, and we’ll make sure you know about industry changes that might affect you. Changes in state licensure regulations, updates to accreditor requirements or templates, and other news in the Higher Education space—we stay on top of all of it, and we make sure you do, too through curated news emails.
External Perspective on Institutional Mission and Identity: As we work with you on your institution’s ongoing compliance, we can help give you an external view on your branding. Is your mission still relevant? Are you conveying the identity that you want to? These are important questions that can be difficult to answer from the inside. We’ve spent over 10 years working with all kinds of higher education organizations, and we know an authentic mission when we see it. We’ll help you make sure your institution is presenting a unique, consistent, and recognizable mission that sets you apart from the crowd.
Priority Support on Substantive Changes and Annual Reports: Since we’re already helping you maintain your best practices and compliance efforts; substantive changes and annual reports are no sweat! We’ll help you assemble any extra documentation and narratives required to meet your goals and timelines.
Licensing Agencies
We provide an outside viewpoint to help state licensing and other licensing agencies make their processes more efficient.
Policy and Processes Review: We work with higher education licensing agencies to provide external perspective and revise policy language and processes to address staff concerns when granting or renewing licensure approvals. This engagement focuses on clarifying the process that institutions, staff, and the public can review to understand the agency’s state-specific requirements and expectations.
New Institutions Seeking Licensure: We work with state agencies who need support in determining whether new institutions meet their minimum requirements to receive state licensure approval or whether they are well-positioned, prior to licensure approval, to receive a grant of accreditation within a set timeframe.
Accreditation Agencies
We help agencies ensure alignment with federal and CHEA recognition requirements, assist with handling the complaint process, and create and update templates and training resources.
Policies, Procedures, and Accreditation Standards Review: We work with accreditors to facilitate reviews of their policies, procedures, and accreditation standards, following US Department of Education updates or as part of their regular evaluations. We facilitate meaningful discussions on the relevance of policies, processes, and accreditation standards to address feedback or staff concerns. We draft new standard language, develop templates, and provide training to support staff. We also present updates to stakeholders to seek further feedback and address concerns.
Managing the Complaint Process: Times may arise when accreditors need additional short-term support, and we can offer a stop gap solution. We can help manage and support accreditors’ complaint processes by reviewing, drafting, and analyzing complaints received in collaboration with staff. This just in time support can alleviate accreditors’ immediate needs while they identify a permanent solution.
US Department of Education & CHEA Recognition: Even accreditors undergo a quality review process, and everyone can benefit from additional perspective and resources. We support accreditors undergoing renewal of recognition as they develop their full petition ahead of their next review cycle or respond to final staff analysis reports. Our team reviews your standards and policies, focusing on alignment with the federal or CHEA recognition criteria, and identifying any gaps in implementation or documentation. We highlight any areas of weakness and work collaboratively to suggest solutions or alternate documentation to demonstrate compliance. We support accreditors in drafting their petition and use staff and Board feedback to make revisions.
Civil Investigative Demands (CIDs) (for accrediting agencies only): In a perfect world, accreditors would never have to respond to Civil Investigative Demands (CIDs), but we live in the real world, and our team can help. We help accreditors gather the necessary documentation, format the submission, and advise on the formal response to the CID. We help our clients navigate the process and ensure they submit a comprehensive response in a timely manner.