The warning placed last year on Nicholls State University by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commissions on Colleges (SACSCOC) has been lifted.

A year after being warned of potential loss of its accreditation, Nicholls has been taken off the warning list. What started as a misinterpretation made by Nicholls about SACSCOC guidelines made the school realize it was not completely meeting the requirements that were crucial to SACSCOC.

The clarifications and revised program documents were sent to SACSCOC, and the warning was then lifted in June 2014. If the warning wasn’t lifted, Nicholls could have been placed on probation, kept on the warning list requiring more documentation and outside reviews or been automatically removed of its accreditation.

There were two outstanding issues on the report in 2013. First and most importantly, Nicholls needed to make sure that there were adequate full-time faculty and staff members correctly doing their jobs, and secondly, that the student-learning outcomes were established and met.

Executive director Renee Hicks said that when the warning was placed, Nicholls stepped up and accepted the need for some revision. The biggest obstacle was core requirement 2.8, faculty adequacy. SACSCOC required a specific amount of full-time faculty and staff to take charge of their programs. Hicks said that the requirements needed proof of procedures and policies in place within a program that are controlled by the faculty. The faculty needed to have qualified people controlling the content, setting learning outcomes and monitoring the entire system.

Which Nicholls had no problem doing,” Hicks said. “We just had to show what our policies and procedures were.”
The students also had to have opportunities to know what their learning outcomes were before taking the class and to learn what they needed before graduating. Each program in the school carefully looked at how things were done and made the necessary changes.

According to Hicks, the changes were in the way everything was documented because, for the most part, the school was doing everything correctly. The changes that were made, however, have improved Nicholls security with the SACSCOC program and will continue to better the school as a whole.

Hicks said that the next steps Nicholls is taking are to send in the next review and get through clean. Nicholls does not only want to get through it, but to be exemplary. Many schools face the same problem, and Nicholls wants to show everyone that changes can be made to significantly improve the entire school.

“The entire staff worked together to come up with new procedures to ensure accreditation for the years ahead,” Hicks said. “The work of the department heads and the program coordinators is what really got them through this situation, and they will not stop until they feel as though they have overachieved what needed to be done. It was a team effort, to say the least.”