Recent national developments have sparked renewed interest in transforming higher education accreditation to better reflect the needs of today’s students. In a time of change in higher education, WSCUC continues to lead with a bold, data-driven approach that prioritizes outcomes, innovation, and the long-term success of students after graduation.

WSCUC’s student-centered accreditation provides a strong model for outcomes- and evidenced-based quality assurance.
 

Focus on Post-Graduate Success

WSCUC has emphasized outcomes-focused accreditation long before it became a national talking point. Our Standards require institutions to look beyond graduation rates and evaluate post-graduation success. Member institutions are required to demonstrate academic excellence, uphold institutional integrity, and conduct rigorous assessment of student outcomes beyond graduation.

We proactively monitor post-graduation outcomes through our Student Outcomes Overview (SOO) dashboard. The SOO dashboard highlights key outcomes metrics — including completion rates, post-graduation debt, and earnings — benchmarked against peer and national data. The dashboard provides institutions a consistent framework for analyzing post-graduation outcomes and identifying areas where performance lags behind peers.
 

Driving Outcomes and Innovation

WSCUC explicitly supports institutional efforts to design innovative programs that respond to workforce needs while reducing time to degree and student debt.

We welcome proposals from institutions pursuing streamlined degree models and competency-based education (CBE) pathways. To support CBE pathways, WSCUC has implemented a dedicated review process that ensures rigorous quality assurance while removing unnecessary barriers to accreditation.

WSCUC embraces new and innovative institutional models, accrediting institutions that offer apprenticeship-based degrees and digital learning environments paired with project-based, experiential learning, among other distinctive educational approaches.

Our longstanding emphasis on outcomes and innovation produces measurable results: Six-year graduation rates at WSCUC’s four-year, degree-granting institutions exceed the national average by six percentage points, and students graduate with 12% less debt.
 

Data-Driven Accreditation

WSCUC is a leader in the use of hard data to quantify student success, institutional performance, and financial sustainability. Through mandatory annual reporting requirements, we have built an extensive longitudinal dataset enabling trend analysis and early identification of at-risk institutions.

With the release of its Key Indicators Dashboard (KID) in 2021, WSCUC became the first institutional accreditor to provide a public, interactive data tool about its accredited institutions. Today, WSCUC institutions routinely use KID to support strategic planning and uncover opportunities to enhance retention and completion rates in a manner consistent with federal law, which has historically required colleges and universities to disaggregate and report student outcomes data by race, sex, and ethnicity.