DCTC Achieves Another 10-Year Unconditional Re-accreditation

For the second time, Dakota County Technical College has received recommendation for 10-year re-accreditation without conditions – the highest recommendation the college can receive from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC).

Kelly Murtaugh, vice president of Academic and Student Affairs and co-chair of the DCTC HLC Re-accreditation Committee, said the college expects to receive official notice this unconditional re-accreditation sometime mid-summer from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.
  
According to the HLC website, continuous contact between the institution and the HLC is vital to the high quality of education: “Accredited institutions are required to submit progress reports, monitoring reports, contingency reports, and annual reports as well as to participate in focus visits.”

The HLC grants accreditation to over 1,000 higher learning institutions in 19 states, according to its website.

Murtaugh said that, during evaluations for re-accreditation, the HLC reviews the institution and examines two questions: Is the institution doing what it says it’s going to do (is it following its mission)? And – is the institution going to be able to continue doing that? They evaluate such factors as the school’s mission, facilities, and education, among other things.

According to Murtaugh, DCTC completed a self-study, which took 18 months to complete, and for which they prepared two years in advance. It involved the college “looking at itself internally” and then doing an evaluation.

She described that the college went through this process 10 years ago, the evaluators mainly examined  the school with criteria that all boiled-down to two main questions: 'What have you done in the last 10 years (to maintain the standards)?’" and "How will you sustain it?"

She added that a big piece was how the school was managing finance. Input from the community, where appropriate, also played a part, as well as participation from “many, many members of the college.”

The unconditional piece is the one that feels good to us, said Murtaugh, who explained that the HLC would not, for example, need to provide a follow-up report in two years to check on whether something was improved. “Ten years ago, it was unconditional [so we maintained that status]. We worked really, really hard to tell our story. They [the HLC team of evaluators] said to us, ‘You made it very easy to find what we needed to know.’”

Murtaugh added that they looked favorably on the school as fiscal managers and strong facilities.

The steering committee at DCTC was led by Murtaugh and Gayle Larson, General Education Instructor and Co-chair of DCTC HLC Re-accreditation Committee. The rest of the team involved another 11 active participants – pairs of faculty and administrators in charge of writing parts of the self-study. Murtaugh emphasized that there were also “contributors [among] everyone on campus.”

“We have a really strong institution with a solid teaching and learning environment – and we can prove it – for what we do, which is technical education,” said Murtaugh.