The accreditation agency that placed a “warning status” on the University of Texas at El Paso last summer will review UTEP’s response and issue its decision on whether to remove, continue or strengthen the sanction this week.
UTEP has had its accreditation placed on warned status by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges twice since 2018, which an accreditation expert said is concerning.
Drumm McNaughton, chair and CEO of The Change Leader, an Albuquerque-based higher education consulting firm, said it’s rare for a university to have its accreditation even once placed on warning status – the lightest penalty available. He said UTEP’s reply likely would satisfy the accreditor’s latest concerns, but he was troubled that this was the university’s second warning in five years and some of the issues were the same.
He suggested that UTEP review its two most recent SACSCOC warnings to see what oversights were repeated and make a point to address them. “Have they remedied them or is it continuing to be a problem that needs to have something beyond a warning,” McNaughton said.
UTEP officials declined to comment on its response, instead the university issued a statement: “We look forward to communicating results with the UTEP community after the SACSCOC board meeting.”
In June, UTEP officials said the issues that the SACSCOC cited were minor and clerical in nature and would be addressed in its reply submitted in September. The university’s response included plenty of tables, transcripts, emails, resumes, mission statements, as well as references to UTEP’s Handbook of Operating Procedures, a 2,622-page 2021-22 UTEP catalog, and the University of Texas System rules and regulations.
A SACSCOC official said the group’s board of trustees should announce its decision on UTEP’s accreditation status by Dec. 7, after the conclusion of its winter meeting in Orlando.
Accreditation is important for several reasons to include it adds value to degrees issued by the institution, and because colleges must be accredited by an agency approved by the U.S. Department of Education to receive federal financial aid.
The accrediting board stated last summer in its disclosure document that UTEP was in “significant non-compliance” to its standards or requirements because it did not provide enough documentation in five key areas: full-time faculty, program length, and qualified administrative/academic officers, as well as program faculty and program coordination. The university expects its response will address SACSCOC’s concerns.
According to the SACSCOC website, the Board of Trustees is made up of 77 people, most are higher education administrators but there also are community representatives who are attorneys, business leaders, and elected officials. Accreditation issues are decided by its 13-member executive council.
“A group of very well qualified university presidents and others will be looking at this report and will make a determination if they agree with that being clerical errors or not,” McNaughton said.
SACSCOC is a Georgia-based accreditation body that oversees the work of degree-granting institutions in Texas, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina, as well as some international institutions. The association’s mission is to assure the educational quality and improve the effectiveness of its member institutions.
In 2018, the association issued a warning to UTEP for various reasons, including a lack of enough qualified full-time faculty and a lack of development of faculty. The warning was lifted a year later.
McNaughton said many institutions choose not to hire an adequate number of full-time faculty to save money. Instead, they employ more adjunct instructors at a lower salary.
In response to an El Paso Matters open records request, UTEP provided parts of the information included in its SACSCOC response, which is called a monitoring report. A note dated Nov. 14, 2023, stated that due to the volume involved, the university would send El Paso Matters its third and final installment on Dec. 5.
In a 31-page document, the university answered each SACSCOC concern, and supported each response with additional information.
For example, SACSCOC said UTEP provided minimal data on credit hours, number of students, number of full- and part-time faculty to understand how the university determines the adequate number of full-time faculty to support the university’s mission. UTEP admitted that it limited the amount of data it provided in a March 2023 referral report, but offered supplementary data in its reply that included student-teacher ratios for teaching, research and community service.
“The University of Texas at El Paso has sufficient faculty to accomplish its mission and goals,” according to the response. It stated that the student-faculty ratio for teaching should be 25:1 or lower and should be consistent with other research institutions in the UT System. “The adequacy of faculty is assessed through student/faculty ratios, teaching loads, research commitments, and other measurable criteria relevant to each aspect of its mission.”
In a different response, UTEP admitted that it did not provide an updated job description for its dean of the College of Health Sciences that would have addressed the issue of administrator qualifications. The university, which hired William Robertson as dean in 2022 after a national search, defended its selection.
Robertson joined UTEP in 2004 as a tenure-track professor after 10 years as a team leader and science and technology educator at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The dean, who became a full professor in 2016, is an award-winning faculty member and researcher. His administrative titles at the university have included associate provost, interim dean of the College of Education, co-chair of the Department of Teacher Education and director of the STEM Education Division.
“The search for Dean of the College of Health Sciences was national and the Search Committee evaluated his credentials and quickly determined that Dr. Robertson’s qualifications elevated him to one of the top candidates,” according to the response. “Ultimately, feedback from the college faculty, the Search Committee, the Council of Deans, the Provost, and the President converged on him as the finalist.”
Additionally, the report stated that Robertson was the principal investigator or co-PI on eight STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) grants, two of which are specifically related to health science and health care education.
The response goes on to state that Robertson “has elevated the interdisciplinary and inter-professional education collaborations in the College of Health Sciences, and has a national reputation for leading-edge methods and instructional technologies to support teaching and learning,”
Robertson didn’t respond to a request for comment from El Paso Matters.
The post Accreditors to issue update to UTEP’s ‘warning status’ appeared first on El Paso Matters.
Read: Read More