Concordia Receives Re-accreditation

by Carrie Black

The extensive project of re-accreditation for Concordia was recently brought into its closing stages. On Feb. 5-6, a team from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) visited the campus of Concordia to meet with professors, faculty, staff and students and analyze the credibility of the university

After working in the accreditation process ten years ago, Natural Science Department Chair Dr. Robert Hermann was asked to lead the task this time around.  

“It was a long process,” Hermann said.  

The undertaking of re-accreditation involved many different components before the visit from HLC members. The first was the writing of an assurance argument. In general, the assurance argument is written to the HLC explaining why the school should be accredited. However, it looks a little different for Concordia

“We’re already accredited – we’ve been accredited for decades,” Hermann said. “We just have to argue that we should keep that” 

The assurance argument is supported by various documents, requiring collaboration from members of the staff and faculty

“The other authors would send me quotes from various documents, or the documents themselves, and I would edit all of that and arrange it and then fill in the blanks with words so that it turned into one long narrative,” Hermann said. 

The second component of the re-accreditation process was completing a federal compliance form, explaining how the university has followed federal guidelines, which allow students to receive financial aid. The combination of the assurance argument and the federal compliance form was then sent to the Higher Learning Commission to be evaluated

“The argument ends up being about 110 pages,” Hermann said. “There are probably about 1,000 documents that went into that. The federal compliance form is 30-40 pages long, with probably anywhere from 1,000-1,500 pages of supporting appendices.” 

The visit from the Higher Learning Commission also included a lunch with a group of twenty five students, who were split into groups and asked questions about their school.

“They asked us what the community-from a sports perspective, from a music perspective, from our perspective- is like,” Junior and panel member Leah Mussell said. “We just said it’s a Christ-like community – our focus is the Great Commission.” 

Hermann is proud of the work of the campus community and the re-accreditation that Concordia received

“It was the work of almost every employee on campus,” Hermann said. “Every single person really pitched in, took it seriously and did a great job in making sure that the argument got completed and that the visit was successful.”