Update on Middle States Accreditation
A Message from Joel Towers, President and University Professor; and Renée T. White, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
To The New School Community,
Our institution is now at the end of its Self-Study process, required by our accreditor (the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, or, MSCHE), which began in late 2021. The hard work our community has done to demonstrate our commitment to our mission was made clear to the peer evaluators, who wrote in their Team Report, “We heard that passion and commitment to the mission in virtually every meeting we had with members of the campus community, and especially from students.” The visiting team further recognized 12 exemplary practices at our institution, including: an “innovative curriculum,” “infusing a deep and supported culture of research across graduate programs and faculty development,” the space governance committee, the internal knowledge base, IT project governance, and “inclusive classroom practices.” That our faculty and staff are recognized by our peers for their ingenuity in these areas is cause for celebration.
Although we were found to meet expectations across most of MSCHE’s 7 standards, we did not meet all of the criteria of standard 5, “Educational Effectiveness Assessment.” While in our Self-Study we were able to demonstrate many instances of assessment across the institution, we were found:
- to be lacking a shared understanding and culture of assessment across all faculty, staff, and leadership;
- to have inconsistent practices across schools;
- to lack documentation of assessment as well as evidence that assessment is being used to inform continuous improvement.
Assessment in this context refers to a systematic process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence to evaluate how effectively teaching practices at the institution enable students to achieve the intended learning outcomes of both courses and degree programs. Not only are we obligated to define and measure the student achievement of learning outcomes, but we are obligated to use those measurements to improve teaching and learning on an ongoing basis. Assessment is distinct from grading, which evaluates student performance by assigning numerical or letter scores to inform the student about their performance in a class, often relative to other students. Assessment is a holistic, ongoing process of understanding student learning at our institution, in our programs, and in our courses, while grading is a more narrow evaluation of academic performance at a specific point in time for individual students.
Middle States has also requested more documentation from the university to illustrate our compliance with their Standard 6 (Planning, Resources, Institutional Improvement). They have clarified that this simply means providing our updated financial audits, which are already publicly available, and further narrative surrounding our fiscal and human resources.
Because this is the second time we have fallen short on educational effectiveness assessment, the visiting Peer Evaluation Team recommended we strengthen our assessment practices, and Middle States has formally warned us. To that end, we are required to sufficiently demonstrate that we have implemented new policies and procedures to meet compliance via a “monitoring report” and a subsequent peer evaluation visit on-campus by August 1, 2025. We are also required to host a liaison visit with a representative from MSCHE in the short-term. MSCHE’s detailed procedures for accreditation actions can be found here.
The Provost, Executive Deans, and the Curriculum and Learning team have been working on these concerns since the Spring, and they will be sharing detailed information about how the institution will be prioritizing this critical work in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we encourage faculty, program directors, and relevant staff to think about the relationship between their curricula, student learning outcomes and student work, and how we use this information to improve the student learning experience.
We thank you for your contributions to the Self-Study and commitment to our institution’s ongoing progress.