By Edward Rotchford, Program Services Coordinator

A consortium or joint venture consists of two or more participating entities, formed by agreement to undertake a common enterprise as a sponsoring entity. In the past few years, there have been a rapidly growing amount of inquiries from sponsors that wanted to open programs in multiple colleges across state lines.

By NAACLS definition, such programs qualify as consortia. However, NAACLS felt that the old consortia policy needed to be updated to assure the full compliance of the Standards at each participating entity within consortia. Therefore, at its April 2009 Board of Directors meeting, NAACLS made new changes to its consortia policy, effective immediately.

The first significant change was made to the Standards, all of which now contain the proper terminology to define consortia. An addition was also made to Unique Standard 21 to include a Consortium Education Coordinator at each participating entity within consortia.

The second significant change was to alter the accreditation procedures by which consortia are accredited.

For new consortia, initial applications, initial application fees, and preliminary reports now must be submitted for each participating entity, along with a Consortium Proposal Report.

For all consortia undergoing accreditation review, only one self-study needs to be submitted. Site visits must be made to each participating entity within consortia, but are done so in a way that minimizes time and cost.

Due to the scope of the review, each participating entity within consortia will receive separate accreditation awards. In cases where a one or more participating entities receives an award that is less than an award given to another entity within the consortium, an interim report will be required from the participating entities that received the lesser award in order to realign the accreditation cycles within the consortium. This allows all participating entities to be reviewed in an efficient and consistent manner. However, if multiple participating entities fail to meet standards, then the accreditation status of the sponsoring entity as a whole may be impacted.

Annual accreditation fees are now also assigned to each participating entity within a consortium. This will impact currently accredited consortia beginning with the annual accreditation invoices that are sent in Summer 2010.

All of the procedural changes are available in detail in the new Guide to Accreditation.