What is accreditation?

A) Something you need to be approved for a credit card.
B) The list of actors at the          end of a movie.
C) Another name for a shell fish.
D) A background check performed before adopting a child.
E) None of the above

A majority of Fresno City students reacted with a blank stare when asked about accreditation. 80 out of 100 students interviewed didn’t even know what accreditation means. A staggering 7 out of 100 student knew that Fresno City College was currently going through accreditation.
Emily Samulka, a sophomore majoring in Liberal Arts, says she knows about the ongoing accreditation activity and that she remembers the college’s warning in 2006
“I remember being in high school and hearing about from older, former classmates about FCC’s  accreditation issues,” Samulka said. “If I hadn’t known anyone going to FCC during the time of the last accreditation, I wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“The goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education [such as FCC] meets acceptable levels of quality,” according to information on the U.S Department of Education website.
Fresno City has been preparing with its self study since August 2009 and must first assess how it measures against the four standards, used by the accreditation team to determine institutional effectiveness.
The standards include Institutional Mission and Effectiveness; Student Learning Programs and Services; Resources and Leadership and Governance.  Accreditation affects the entire school, students, staff and faculty, yet why do we know nothing about it? During the last accreditation FCC received its lowest scores lowest on Student Services as well as the Library and Media Resources.
Expressing high hopes and full confidence, student trustee, Chris Coronado, said he has high hopes for the accreditation review. On whether the college had a better chance than it did in 2005, Coronado was definite.
“I’ve learned what issues were brought up (during the last accreditation), more specifically being put on warning for participatory governance, something that we have improved on remarkably since 2005,” he said. “Students are now able to attend all of these committee [meetings] that ASG is a part of, and it’s open publicly, so that they can voice their concerns; that is something the district and the campus has improved on a lot.”
Another area Fresno City College got a low score on during the 2005 accreditation is on library resources and media center. The library has improved on the number of encyclopedias and periodicals as well as in its online data bases, in response to the last accreditation.
However, Trustee Coronado said he is not as optimistic about the college meeting the accreditation standard.  “Unfortunately I don’t think we have improved on the aspect of providing actual service (in the library) to the students,” he said. “I can say that because we have cut the hours of the library; unfortunately that’s a function of budget.”