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Background
Like many of the Regional Accreditors in the United States, HLC considers the appropriate qualification of faculty members in both its Assumed Practices as well as the specific Criteria for accreditation. In the fall of 2015, HLC revised and clarified its guidelines for Faculty Qualifications.
HLC’s Criterion Three (Teaching and Learning: Quality, Resources, and Support) speaks to faculty qualifications in Core Component 3.C. Faculty qualifications must also be addressed as part of Assumed Practice B.
While HLC has not created a standard template for this reporting, we believe the guidelines are clear enough that a standard base report could be created in collaboration with a few clients. To develop this report, we collaborated with:
- New Mexico State University
- Pittsburgh State University
- University of Central Arkansas
- University of Colorado-Colorado Springs
Report Details
The HLC Faculty Qualification Report displays all teaching faculty by assigned College and Department, including information about the rank, tenure status and graduate faculty status of each instructor. The report has an option to display all courses the faculty member taught during the reporting time frame and it displays all Education and License/Certification records for the faculty member. In this way, you can quickly see if qualifications align appropriately with the department assignment (and actual teaching assignments) of the faculty member.
HLC, like many other accrediting bodies, also provides for cases of qualification outside of traditional degrees, licenses and certifications. The accrediting body recognizes that in some circumstances, faculty may be qualified to teach outside of their specific degree discipline because of graduate-level coursework in another area, or because of a breadth and depth of knowledge acquired in other ways—“tested experience.”
Our Qualification Report accounts for both additional methods of qualification. If a faculty member has graduate-level coursework in another sub-field or discipline, that can be tracked on the Education screen and will be displayed along with the Degree information in this report. If the University has defined “Tested Experience” and determined that certain faculty are qualified based on this definition, we provide a place to capture this in Faculty Success and will display the indicator and basis for qualification text in the report as well.
HLC also requires that faculty who teach in graduate or doctoral programs have an appropriate record of research, scholarship or achievement. Evidence for this portion of the faculty qualification guidelines can be shown using the HLC Scholarship and Research Summary Report.
Other Considerations
When you implement this report at your own institution there are several things you will want to consider.
Tested Experience
As part of implementing this report, we will add a new field to the Permanent Data screen where you can indicate whether a faculty member is qualified based on "tested experience.”
Degrees, Licenses and Certifications
By default, the HLC Faculty Qualification report includes all degree and all current license/certification information. If you would prefer that we only include the highest degree earned, or if you would like to implement a field on both screens to indicate “qualifying” degree(s) and licenses/certifications, we can update the report to only show these types of records.
Other things to note
- For faculty to display on this report, they must have Scheduled Teaching records that fall within the date range – remember to keep your records on this screen up to date for your faculty!
- If you have a faculty member with dual college assignments, the faculty information will display in both college sections.
Level of Detail
Faculty Success provides two different ways that institutions can choose to document faculty qualifications in Faculty Success and the HLC Qualification Summary Report is compatible with both.
In the Basic Approach, a new read-only text box is added to the Permanent Data screen where comments and explanations regarding “other qualifications” can be entered. This information will be pulled into the fourth column of the report.
For institutions that are looking to more clearly document the link between each individual course the qualifications related to it, our Course Level Approach provides an additional screen that allows administrators to select the specific degrees, licenses/certifications and work history via record reference fields, add additional text and supporting documentation and connect the relevant courses to that qualification. Institutions that select this approach will receive an additional audit report designed to help keep this new screen up to date.
You may also wish to review this article about the options.
Request this Report
If you would like to implement the HLC Qualification report, simply submit a ‘Report Setup’ work request asking for this base report.