Cabrini seems to be ready to be re-accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and Schools next week.
Middle States will send eight non-Cabrini affiliated volunteers from other institutions to spend March 22 to 25 with Cabrini students, faculty, staff and administrators to gauge if Cabrini is meeting the Middle State’s 14 “Standards of Excellence.”
According to Dr. Jeff Gingerich, interim provost and vice president of academic affairs, the accreditation process serves three primary purposes. First, the review helps the college to provide better services to students; second, to prove to the outside world that Cabrini is providing a quality education; and third, it affords the school full federal funding and ensure that the school can give appropriate financial aid to its students.
“I’m so grateful for all the energy that faculty, staff and students have put into this self-study,” Gingerich said. “While it has been a lot of work, I think the process has really helped us to understand ourselves better and to improve the experience that we provide our students.”
Among the students that Gingerich is speaking of is Mario Marino, finance, international business and accounting triple major, who will be meeting with Dr. Sudan Hudec, vice president of student life and dean of students at St. Joseph’s College in New York and one of the eight volunteers coming to re-accredit Cabrini.
“It’s a very exciting time for the college,” Marino, who is also student body president of SGA, said. “It is a great form of self-regulation that ensure that legitimate institutions are constantly adapting, striving for success and meeting the needs of the students they serve.”
Like Marino, Dr. Maliha Zaman, assistant to the provost for assessment and accreditation, also sees this process as one of reflection and improvement.
“Even though it seems like a very daunting process, and it is, the idea is for your peers to give you a wake-up call—to say ‘hey, these are the things you might be lacking,’” Zaman said.
Middle States is an organization that accredits all of the institutions in the North East, as well as Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands. While the Middle States focuses on student learning outcomes, they also give attention to a school’s enrollment and financial stability.
The organization re-accredits a school by sending a physical team of its non-affiliated volunteers every 10 years and has the school do a self-review midway through each decade-long gap between physical reviews.
In preparation for this year’s Middle States visit, Cabrini has written a lengthy 200-plus paged report that encompasses all the evidence and documents that will show Cabrini is a solid institution that holds the standards it needs to be re-accredited.
According to Zaman, during Cabrini’s 2010 self-review is when the school realized that they had many things to improve upon at that time, but since has acted on what they learned from nearly five years ago.
“The way the institution has embraced the fact that we were lacking in some standards is amazing because everyone came together and said ‘okay these are the things we need to improve on,’“ Zaman said.
Aside from a little “cautious optimism,” regardless of the process still nearly a week away, and the results of the review not being released until mid-year, Zaman still believes Cabrini is more than ready for the Middle States.
“The thing that we will have to learn is that now that we did it, how do we improve upon it? How do we maintain it?” Zaman said. “Because maintenance of this thing is keeping the momentum going. It’s something that every institution finds a challenge.”
