The Role of Trustees in Accreditation*

*Editor’s Note: This blog post is adapted from Michael F. Middaugh, The Board’s Role in Accreditation (Washington, D.C.: AGB, 2007), 6-11. Middaugh provides some timeless advice for higher education board members with respect to planning, assessing student-learning outcomes, and promoting institutional effectiveness and efficiency as part of the accreditation process. Now more than ever, governing boards have fiduciary responsibilities to protect their institutions’ missions. Accreditation remains a critical tool for boards and institutions to ensure educational quality, which is central to their missions. Further guidance is available in the AGB-CHEA Joint Advisory Statement on Accreditation & Governing Boards 2022. The public policy landscape surrounding institutional accreditation is changing in 2025, a development that is having real-time impacts on the current system of accreditation. For policy updates, see the AGB Top Public Policy Issues Facing Governing Boards in 2025–2026 report.

Trustees, as institutional stewards, have an obligation to ensure that a college or university operates efficiently and effectively, educates its students to be productive members of society, and strives in every dimension of its activity to fulfill the organization’s mission. Because accrediting agencies have articulated standards focusing on essentially the same outcomes for member institutions, there is a natural synergy between trusteeship and accreditation. Indeed, a board can use the accreditation process as a framework for assessing how well the institution is meeting its educational and societal mission.

Perhaps the single most important document or set of documents around which a college or university’s accreditation activity is organized are those related to the institutional mission.

The mission statement provides valuable context for three specific functional areas for which boards have oversight responsibility and upon which there are accreditation standards for judging institutional performance:

1. A systematic planning process that drives institutional decisions, especially those related to allocation of human and financial resources.
2. Assessment of student-learning outcomes.
3. Assessment of institutional effectiveness and efficiency.

Although accreditation standards are by no means limited to these three areas, boards have a significant stake in these institutional functions. What then should trustees look for in each of these areas?

Planning

Boards, like accrediting bodies, should seek from a college or university’s leadership demonstrable evidence that systematic and strategic planning activity is occurring at the institution. There is no single formula for a successful planning process, but all successful planning processes have common elements:

• Good planning is broadly participatory. It is the product of serious discussions among a broad array of internal and external constituencies with respect to the institution’s aspirations, core values, vision, and strategies for achieving that vision. The board should ensure that planning draws upon the collective wisdom of the faculty members, staff, students, and others who constitute the institution’s community.
• Good planning is mission-based. It entails serious discussion of core institutional values, vision, and strategies that are clearly rooted in the mission statement and that lend themselves to action-oriented policy statements designed to help the institution realize that mission.
• Good planning integrates academic, financial, human resource, and facilities planning. The board should ensure that all planning can be tied to a rationale that is rooted in the academic plan for enhancing teaching and learning.
• Good planning is measurable. When goal statements are articulated from a mission statement, they should be accompanied by measurable objectives that allow administrators—and boards—to assign accountability.
• Good planning is iterative. It is not a one-time effort resulting from a planning retreat or in anticipation of an accreditation self-study. Effective planning is a rolling process, with continuous reassessment of objectives, progress, and the internal and external environment. The board should receive regular updates on implementation of the strategic plan, metrics used to assess that progress, and proposed changes to the plan.

Assessment of Student-Learning Outcomes

It no longer is sufficient simply to state that students learn in multiple ways on the road to graduation or that an institution is making optimal use of its resources in support of teaching, research, and service. Institutions must provide clear and demonstrable evidence of such assertions. The accreditation process aside, the board should routinely request evidence of institutional effectiveness and student-learning outcomes.

Trustees should ask administrators to present multiple measures that demonstrate that students have experienced significant and demonstrable cognitive gains as the result of the higher education experience. As advocates for their institution, trustees should be conversant in the ways in which the institution measures learning. Although there is no “one size fits all” approach to assessing student learning, trustees should be familiar with the general strategies for such assessments. What sorts of evidence should trustees focus upon?

• Course grades are the most basic assessment of student learning, but they also might be the most unreliable. They are highly subjective measures that can vary across instructors teaching the same course, and they certainly vary across disciplines. Although useful measures in some respects, course grades should not be relied upon as the best metric for assessing student learning.
• Standardized tests are particularly useful for assessing learning skills in professional disciplines that require some form of licensure. However, there also are several standardized instruments for assessing general education competencies across the disciplines. Standardized tests have limitations, but they do provide useful aggregate information about learning.
• Collections of student work from a number of courses across the curriculum are frequently examined as “portfolios.” These are graded by teams of experts who study the portfolio for evidence of general education or disciplinary skills that are graded on a consistent scale.
• Final projects—often in the form of student shows, performances, or research experiences—provide evidence of mastery within a discipline or across the general education dimension.
• Capstone experiences such as senior theses or field experiences such as an internship demonstrate mastery at the culmination of the academic program.

These are but a few examples of strategies institutions can use to assess student-learning outcomes. Trustees generally need not be versed in the intricacies of each strategy. That said, trustees should ascertain that academic departments are making use of multiple measures for assessing student learning and that those assessments are being used to improve teaching and learning. Assessment should not be done simply to satisfy regional or program accreditation requirements. Although collecting this information happens to be an accreditation requirement, they also are vital data a board can use in monitoring the institution’s overall performance.

The board should insist on transparency regarding the results of such assessments. Institutions should be able to demonstrate that the students they serve are intellectually transformed by their educational experiences. To do so, they must offer multiple—and clearly understood—measures that demonstrate that learning is taking place.

Assessment of Institutional Effectiveness

At the core of the board’s responsibilities is ensuring that the institution is making effective and efficient use of human and financial resources. Accrediting bodies require evidence that an institution is appropriately deploying such resources in accordance with its strategic plan, especially with respect to resource allocation. Obviously, boards require the same sort of evidence in fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities. What evidence should trustees look for with respect to measuring institutional effectiveness?

• Evidence that the institution is utilizing its teaching resources effectively. Are teaching loads comparable with those of faculty at peer institutions? Is the cost of instruction, when examined at the level of the academic discipline, comparable with costs at other institutions? Do faculty engage in the same range of out-of-classroom activities—academic advising, curriculum development, scholarship, and service—as faculty in similar disciplines at peer institutions? Many resources are available to respond to these questions. Although trustees need not immerse themselves in the details of such data, it is wholly appropriate to ask whether such management tools are being used as a means of gauging the effective and efficient use of teaching resources.
• Evidence that the institution is meeting appropriate benchmarks for key performance indicators. For example, is faculty and administrative compensation sufficiently competitive to allow the institution to attract and retain the best available personnel? Do the institution’s financial indicators underscore effective and efficient use of fiscal resources? Is the institution making the most effective use of technology in teaching and learning and in administrative operations?
• Evidence that the institution is addressing the needs of its constituencies. Colleges and universities routinely and systematically should measure student use of and satisfaction with their programs and services. Do available programs and services coincide with the stated needs of those who use them? Many institutions extend the analysis of constituent satisfaction to include faculty and other employees. National projects such as the National Survey of Student Engagement (commonly abbreviated as NSSE) help institutions assess the extent and quality of interactions between and among constituent groups on campus.

These are but three examples of key issues in assessing institutional effectiveness. As is the case with assessing student-learning outcomes, accrediting agencies and boards alike should be looking for evidence not only of multiple measures of institutional effectiveness but also for evidence that these measures actually are being used by the institution to inform the strategic planning process.