On Feb. 19, Swarthmore President Val Smith announced that the college would pursue a switch in its accreditation organization from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) to the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE). Between punishing winter storms and the recently announced presidential transition, the news came during a hectic beginning to the spring semester. If the college’s application is approved, a new institution will be responsible for externally monitoring Swarthmore’s academic quality.
While it remains somewhat unconventional for a Pennsylvania college to pursue accreditation from NECHE rather than MSCHE, non-regional accreditation is becoming increasingly common.
In 2019, the first Trump administration reversed an existing rule that gave regional accreditation agencies priority, and by extension, effective monopoly over their respective regions. National accreditors were and are still often perceived as lower quality than regionalized ones, and are responsible for many for-profit institutions of higher education.
Beyond helping these national accreditors, however, the rule change has also allowed agencies like NECHE to accredit schools outside of their traditional regions, subjecting the accreditation process to a more market-like model.
Following the rule’s reversal, some colleges began to seek accreditation from agencies that were familiar with institutions similar to theirs rather than just those that were nearby. Because of the large number of small liberal arts colleges that are in New England and were already accredited by NECHE, several such colleges outside of the region also applied to NECHE during this time.
It’s clear that NECHE’s affiliation with these peer institutions was a large part of Swarthmore’s motivation to apply for their accreditation.
“While we have enjoyed a positive relationship with colleagues at Middle States, we are drawn to NECHE, particularly for its understanding of and alignment with small liberal arts colleges like ours,” Smith wrote in her email to the community.
The summarizing report that Swarthmore wrote to target each of NECHE’s standards for accreditation ahead of its visit to campus this week also invoked the specific needs of small liberal arts colleges. These institutions “must provide similar services and address the same compliance obligations as our larger counterparts,” it says. “Faculty and staff at small liberal arts colleges therefore tend to wear multiple hats. While this flexibility enhances our ability to serve our students, it can also create burdens that fall to a limited number of individuals.” Because of this, the report states, Swarthmore would prefer an accreditor that is familiar with the unique structure of small schools.
While NECHE does accredit many liberal arts colleges, it also is responsible for schools known for their more open-curriculum models, such as Amherst College and Brown University. Additionally, New England’s institutions of higher education, which include much of the Ivy League and some of the nation’s oldest schools, are often more established than those in other parts of the country. This might allow NECHE to take a more hands-off approach to the accreditation process. While Swarthmore’s communications don’t reference this, they do highlight the way that procedural obligations fall harder on staff at smaller institutions.
“We believe that NECHE’s standards and approach to accreditation will provide a more appropriate framework for our self-evaluation, offering opportunities and flexibility to focus on areas that are central to our mission, and most important to our work,” the report continues.
“As an institutional accreditor, NECHE has two purposes: 1) to assure the quality of and 2) to support the continuous improvement of the institutions in its membership,” Laura Gambino, vice president of NECHE, wrote in email communication with The Phoenix. “While there may be some policy and procedure differences between NECHE and Middle States, these dual purposes, which guide the philosophical approach to accreditation, are the same.”
Lisa Smulyan, Henry C. and Charlotte Turner professor emerita of educational studies, researched and taught about higher education and was involved in the college’s re-accreditation process on several occasions throughout her 40 years on Swarthmore’s faculty. In email correspondence with The Phoenix, she highlighted the important role of the reaccreditation process as an intermittent opportunity for the college to step back and seriously evaluate its work.
“We often get busy doing our day-to-day work and don’t have the time to step back and reflect on what we want to do, what we are actually doing, and why we are doing it,” she wrote.
While there was value in this introspection, some elements of the Middle States’ evaluation approach focused substantially on getting the college to show that it had met its goals through measurable outcomes, which placed a heavy burden on departments and faculty and limited the kinds of outcomes that could be assessed.
“I don’t know whether it was Middle State’s rules or the college’s interpretation of their guidelines, but the only acceptable process to demonstrate that the college was meeting its learning goals became direct assessment of student learning based primarily on quantitative measures,” Smulyan said. “The process quickly became quite rigid, quite regimented, and resulted in a lot of work trying to meet a demand to solve a problem that most of us on the faculty didn’t think existed.”
She mentioned that the relationship between the college and its accreditors became a topic of faculty discussion after the development of those new evaluation processes. “Some of us asked the college to push back against Middle States, trying to get them to explore other approaches to the narrow definitions and processes that seemed to be their norm (or at least became the college’s norm),” she added.
Beyond these important considerations for the college’s evaluation process, Smulyan wrote that Swarthmore’s accrediting institution didn’t have much impact on her day-to-day life as a professor or department chair. Gambino backed this up, writing, “With the change to NECHE, there should be little, if any, impact on the various constituents.”
In the weeks following Smith’s email, a clearer picture of the college’s application process for NECHE has emerged. On Feb. 26, Assistant Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness and Assistant Secretary of the College Robin Huntington Shores shared more about a team of NECHE reviewers visiting campus in early March in an email to campus.
This team consisted of representatives from other colleges and universities accredited by NECHE, including leaders from Middlebury College, Trinity College, and other schools. Throughout their visit from Mar. 2-4, they met with different members of the campus community as part of their review, and hosted three open sessions to hear from faculty, staff, and students, respectively. During these sessions, the representatives asked for honest, unattributed feedback about which parts of the college’s operations were working well and which weren’t.
After many already-accredited institutions sought to switch their accreditation following the 2019 rule change, NECHE developed a special process for these schools that allows a more accessible five-year accreditation term before more extensive, regular reaccreditations.
“For institutions that were already accredited, it doesn’t make sense to treat them as if they were a brand-new institution having never been accredited,” NECHE President Larry Schall told Inside Higher Ed at the time. “Our process for brand-new institutions takes five to ten years.”
Gambino added that the application is designed to ensure that institutions seeking accreditation meet NECHE’s standards for accreditation. The report and the reviewer visits are the first and second steps of that process, respectively. Next, the reviewing team will write its own evaluation to be considered by NECHE alongside the college’s report. Following this, Swarthmore’s president will appear before the Commission to discuss the application. Finally, NECHE will decide whether Swarthmore meets its accreditation standards and, if so, the change of the college’s accreditation will be sent to the U.S. Department of Education for approval.
The application report, written by the president’s senior staff in collaboration with Shores, Registrar Kristen Smith, Assistant Vice President of Sustainability Elizabeth Drake and Professors Chris Graves, Eric Jensen, Jennifer Peck, Lisa Meeden, Cat Norris, K. Elizabeth Stevens, and Dominic Tierney, identifies many aspects of Swarthmore that they see as real strengths to put forward, as well as some weaknesses to work on and other important developments.
The report highlights the 2018-19 effort to re-establish a formal mission statement and the subsequent effort to base the Swarthmore Forward strategic plan on that mission. Swarthmore Forward takes a prominent role throughout the report to identify the college’s current priorities. The report discusses the results of 2011’s Strategic Directions plan (notably, the Dining and Community Commons, Office of Sustainability, Center for Innovation and Leadership, and the Aydelotte Foundation) as a to segue to the elements of Swarthmore Forward that have been implemented (the hiring of Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Brooke Vick, and the renovation of Martin Hall), as well as those currently underway.
Other relevant sections include a discussion of the Board of Managers’ recent focus on governance issues. “One change of note is the addition of faculty responsibility for the academic program, a point which was well understood previously, but not explicitly stated,” the report details. This change comes at a time when the Board has recently faced protest and disapproval but the college’s faculty retains strong support across campus.
Interestingly, the report seems to pick up on ongoing conversations about changes in the way the administration communicates with other institutions of the college. The Phoenix’s Fall 2025 polling found that faculty felt a somewhat low and decreasing amount of faculty governance in the college’s decision-making process. And, in an interview with The Phoenix, President Val Smith discussed her communication style, arguing that periodical campus-wide announcements allowed her to communicate directly with all constituents in a way that smaller conversations did not. Perhaps in response to these conversations, the report reads, “An area for improvement on which the College is focusing is better communication and understanding between the president’s staff and the faculty.”
The report also highlights two other ongoing issues. It references a 2022 Council on Economic Policy study as informing parts of Swarthmore Forward through its observation that the shift from a five-course to a four-course teaching load for faculty, the growth of student interest in STEM disciplines and economics, the expansion of the student body, and other factors, had placed pressure on Swarthmore’s high-quality teaching and learning environment.”
Notably, it also reports on a committee that was formed ad hoc by the Committee on Faculty Procedures that was charged to “define academic freedom more clearly for the College.” The recommendations of the committee, which will draw from external resources and institutions as well as examining past work on the issue on campus, will be brought to the full faculty before being submitted for Board approval.
These discussions are only a fraction of the content about Swarthmore presented in the report. Still, though, they are indicative of the kinds of conversations that the decision to seek new accreditation brings up. From the accreditor’s end, Gambino wrote, “NECHE is always happy to welcome new institutions into its membership, and the Commission is looking forward to welcoming Swarthmore into its membership.”
