The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) Commission of Colleges reaffirmed UTD as an accredited institution of higher education on Dec. 8 at its 113th annual meeting in San Antonio.
The accreditation is for 10 years with a five-year review in 2013.
In an announcement sent to faculty and staff, President David Daniel said that reaccreditation reflects UTD's "soundness in areas of faculty qualifications, curriculum, student services, libraries, and financial stability."
Reaffirmation ensures continued access to federal funds for grants, student loans and academic programs from which non-accredited institutions are barred.
The requirements for SACS accreditation have changed dramatically since the previous assessment a decade ago, said Robert Nelsen, former vice-provost. As SACS liaison from 2005-2008, Nelsen oversaw the reaffirmation process.
"This was just radically different," Nelsen said. "These are 85 principles that you look at yourself and say okay, here's who we really are. So it became a true self-study instead of just checking off boxes."
Associate provost Abby Kratz informed the administration of changes to the accreditation process after a 2005 SACS meeting. Actual work towards reaffirmation didn't begin until early 2006, a year and a half before initial reports had to be submitted.
When Nelsen was appointed SACS liaison, he said he faced an enormous task.
We were behind," he said.
The majority of work that was done for reaffirmation went into collecting and organizing the evidence that had to be submitted to SACS. Credentials of every member of the faculty had to be checked, old paper records had to be put into electronic form and student learning outcomes had to be documented for every department on campus.
The final report submitted to SACS ran to over 500 pages with more than 103,000 pages of documentation.
"I think we've strengthened our infrastructure that has to do with supporting quality education," Kratz said. "We are able now to hold ourselves much more accountable for what we do because we actually have command of the information that we need to be able to evaluate that."
The SACS provision that had the greatest impact on the university, Kratz said, was the Quality Enhancement Plan, which required UTD to draw up a blueprint and allocate funding for a program to improve student learning.
The result was Gateways to Excellence in Math & Science, a program that seeks to help students succeed in introductory calculus and chemistry courses.
Thom Chesney, GEMS director and current SACS liaison said that such a program generally doesn't happen organically.
"UTD is a very unique institution, but for (GEMS) just to happen would have been rare," he said. "It would have been rare anywhere for that to come together."
So far, GEMS seems to be a success, Chesney said. In the first semester since its implementation, failure and withdrawal from introductory chemistry and calculus classes are at record lows.
Nelsen said the procedures implemented for SACS have had an enormous positive impact for students at UTD.
"We looked at ourselves as a research institution and not necessarily as an institution that put a heavy emphasis on teaching and learning," Nelsen said. "SACS made us take a look and see what we were actually doing to improve teaching and learning."
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