The Handbook of Accreditation, Section Six, provides a detailed description of the requirements for seeking approval of new degree programs. In order to ensure more consistency in the formatting of these petitions, and to assist the Board of Commissioners (“Board”) in evaluating these proposals, the following, additional elements should be addressed in a petition to the Board:

1.     Schools should attend to all the issues outlined in the Handbook and should also address and reference in the petition all the components of the proposed degree program standard, as stated in the Bulletin, Part I, “Degree Program Standards,” and Bulletin, Part I, “Procedures for Approval of New Degree Programs” (section IV).

2.     The petition should contain a financial assessment of the costs of the program and its impact on the overall institutional budget.

3.     The petition should include an assessment of the impact of the new program on faculty resources, library, student services, and other institutional assets.

4.     The petition should provide a description of the assessment and evaluation process for the proposed degree and should indicate how this particular assessment of the degree program is integrated into the overall assessment and evaluation program of the institution.

5.     The petition should include an analysis of projected enrollments and a recruitment plan to sustain a viable community of learning for the degree program.

6.     Petitions for new master’s level programs should be submitted by April 1 or November 1 for consideration by the Board of Commissioners at the respective May/June and January plenary sessions of the Board meeting. If the petition is for a new doctoral program, the Procedures require that preliminary approval will be considered only after a focused evaluation visit has been conducted. In order to schedule these focused visits in a timely fashion, the Board and the Commission staff members request that petitions for new doctoral programs be received for consideration by the Board at its meeting three semesters prior to the anticipated start-up date for the program. Thus,

If a school is anticipating starting a new doctoral degree in September 2006, the petition should be submitted to the Board for consideration at its plenary meeting in June 2005. The petition should be submitted no later than April 1, 2005, in order to be considered by the Board. An additional reason for this longer time line is to allow the school to address and resolve any deficiencies that a focused visit team might discover when it arrives to make the on-site evaluation. For example, previously, if a focused visit team arrived in April of the semester prior to a planned start-up date in September for the new program, there was very little time for the school to respond to issues raised by the visiting team, and it was quite likely that the school would have received an action of deferral by the Board.

7.     The petition should also indicate attention to any regional accrediting considerations as well as compliance with any governmental requirements mandated by Canadian or United States higher education bodies.

8.     In summary, in addition to the above guidelines, petitions for new degree programs should address the guidelines outlined in the Handbook of Accreditation, Section Six, “Guidelines Adopted by the Commission on Accrediting”; Bulletin, Part I, section IV, Procedures for Approval of New Degree Programs; and, Bulletin, Part I, Degree Program Standards.

adopted June 2003

Please send two copies of your petition or report single-spaced, single-sided, and unbound (to help facilitate their reproduction).