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2015-2016 Year in Review
Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) Accreditation
Last year, we followed our timeline and successfully met the September 1, 2015,
deadline for submission of the College’s follow-up MSCHe monitoring report, which
we developed to document and verify our assessment and evaluation efforts. at
report was followed by a Middle States small team visit to the College in october.
i am proud to share with you that our College successfully progressed from
warning status to a highly positive Middles States visit, where we received seven
commendations related to planning, assessment and resource allocation. in addition,
our comprehensive approach to the accreditation process was ultimately recognized
by SUNY as a best practice and is now being shared with other institutions in the
system. our faculty, staff, administrators, students, and Board of Trustees were all
instrumental in enabling us to reach this successful conclusion.
i believe our institutional experiences over the past three years were a legacy moment
in our history. it is clear, as i reflect upon the effort put forth by everyone during this
process, that the decisions made and the actions taken to address MSCHe expectations
enabled Suffolk County Community College to emerge on the other side of an
extensive volume of meaningful work and collegial discourse as a stronger institution.
we did not conduct a cursory review, but probed deeply in an effort to fully examine
our practices and make the hard decisions we knew would withstand the test of even
the most critical external review – and we succeeded in a monumental way.
Moving forward, Middle States has adopted revised standards for all institutions
that will affect our next accreditation event. in line with our institutional reputation,
we will work to exceed those expectations as we move on to our MSCHe Decennial
Self-Study.
To organize the College’s Self-Study review, i named Dr. Lauren Tacke-Cushing,
our Accreditation Liaison officer, and Professor Dan Linker, nominated by faculty
Governance, to serve as co-chairs of the Self-Study Steering Committee. in addition,
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2015-2016 Review of Accomplishments