Ryan ChartrandCuesta College is working hard to redeem itself over the next few months after being placed on a warning status by its accreditation commission. The college was officially warned in January by the Accreditation Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) to heed its recommendations for improvement or risk losing accreditation altogether.
Located six miles north of Cal Poly off of California Highway 1, Cuesta acts as the junior college for many students who hope to eventually transfer to Cal Poly and complete their four-year degrees.
With 10,781 students currently enrolled, the college offers short courses, continuing and distance education, vocational and technical training and various associate degree programs, as well as many lower-division courses which students can receive credit for when they transfer to a four-year university. If Cuesta were to lose its accreditation, Cal Poly would no longer be able to accept the junior college’s transfer units.
In response to the warnings of the ACCJC, the college penned a letter Wednesday pledging to fill all the vacant positions in its administration by this summer and stated that officials have already been setting goals and budgets for academic programs, as per the commission’s recommendations.
In its first move toward fulfilling that promise, the college welcomed its new president, David Pelham, to its ranks Monday.
The ACCJC, which is part of the larger Western Association of Schools and Colleges, is the accrediting body for private and public two-year colleges. According to the commission’s Web site, “accreditation is the process for evaluating and assuring the quality of education used by the American higher education community.”
After a November 2007 site visit and accompanying status report by the school, the ACCJC decided during its January meeting to warn the school that it was at risk of losing accreditation. January’s warning came after years of calls for improvement from the accrediting commission, dating back to early 2003, and an apparently unsatisfactory response by the school.
“A warning is issued when the commission finds that an institution has pursued a course of action which deviates from the commission’s eligibility criteria, standards of accreditation, or policy to an extent that raises a concern regarding the ability of the institution to meet accreditation standards,” according to the ACCJC’s Web site.
A letter from the commission to Cuesta on Jan. 31 warned that “institutions out of compliance with standards or on sanction are expected to correct deficiencies within a two-year period or the commission must take action to terminate accreditation.”
Pelham said that despite the serious tone of the warning, he thought it “unlikely” that Cuesta’s accreditation would be affected in the future.
“There are some issues the accreditation commission wants us to address and we’re working on that,” he said. He noted that there are approximately 20 other junior colleges in California currently facing the same situation as Cuesta.
“It would by highly unusual for a college to lose accreditation over something like this,” Pelham continued.
Without accreditation, Cuesta would no longer be eligible for federal financial aid, and – most significantly in relation to Cal Poly – lower-division credits would no longer be transferable from the junior college.
Cuesta first faced reprimand in 2003, when it was forewarned that certain problems could place its accreditation in jeopardy if not addressed.
Cuesta performed an in-depth self-study in 2002, wherein it recognized that it needed to enhance communication within the college; improve professional development for faculty, staff and managers; strengthen efforts to diversify its faculty and staff; and generally improve college procedures, including its program review process.
ACCJC reviewed that self-study report in January 2003, and reaffirmed Cuesta’s accreditation, but strongly suggested the college strengthen its program review and unit-planning processes and take appropriate actions to assure the tie-in of that program review with its budget- and priority-setting processes.
Even with those four years to improve, Cuesta’s most recent progress report and on-site visit on Nov. 6, 2007 found many of the same problems still unsolved, echoing almost verbatim the same language of its previous recommendation in its letter to the college on Jan. 31, 2008.
“You think you’re making the right decisions and being responsive to the commission’s recommendations, until one day a visiting team shows up and says maybe you weren’t interpreting those recommendations correctly,” said Pelham, who comes to Cuesta with nearly two decades of community college administration experience under his belt.
The ACCJC team further noted that out of Cuesta’s 10 senior administrator positions, six were interim and one was vacant at the time of the visit, and that then-Interim President Ed Maduli was also doubling as Interim Vice President for Student Learning. Pelham replaced Maduli as Cuesta’s new president on March 3.
Now duly warned and with a new president at the helm, Cuesta is working hard to meet the requirements of the ACCJC by filling the remaining vacancies by June 30, and refining its budget priorities and academic program development processes.
“The accreditation standards are very broad,” Pelham explained. “It’s a great deal of work to make sure all the requirements of the commission are met. My job as president is to make sure the checks and balances are in place, but it’s a huge, campus-wide effort to maintain those standards.”
Even so, he’s optimistic about leading Cuesta through its current unstable stage and back to solid, accredited ground.
“This is just one of those phases you sometimes go through in the accreditation cycle,” he explained. “It’s a situation you hope you don’t find yourself in, but we’re always working to try and uphold those accreditation standards and to try to meet the recommendations the commission sets out for us.”
“Cuesta is still a long way from losing its accreditation,” he emphasized.
The commission will make a follow-up visit in late March or early April to assess the college’s improvement efforts.
Pelham however, stressed that he does not want students to feel overly concerned about the commission’s warning. “Current, past and future Cuesta students need to understand that there has never been any serious threat to Cuesta’s accreditation,” he said.