By Janna Oakes, Vice President, Institutional Effectiveness, Accreditation Liaison Officer, and Associate Professor, Medical Humanities, Rocky Vista University
A little background
I am a 30-year higher education professional with a passion for inclusive excellence and specific expertise in academic leadership, student learning assessment, and accreditation. I’ve been a peer reviewer for the Higher Learning Commission since 2008, a commitment that has afforded me opportunities domestically and as far away as Beijing, China, to work on multi-location visits, substantive change requests and visits, comprehensive visits, and federal compliance reviews.
Wendy Kilgore’s team invited me to craft an updated chapter on accreditation, an endeavor for which registrars are critical institutional leaders. Accrediting agencies expect institutions to have clear processes for ensuring the quality of the academic credit they accept as transfer credit, adhering to generally accepted practice in terms of program length, and demonstrating compliance with the federal definition of a credit hour. These matters generally fall under the purview of the registrar.
As the chapter on accreditation neared completion, the team invited me to expand on assessment matters, which ultimately became a second chapter. Because registrars are responsible for transcripting educational credit, they have a vested interest in – and commitment to – instructional quality and student outcomes. While teaching, learning, and assessment are clearly faculty responsibilities, registrars are helpful guides regarding the timing of curricular changes, assessing the potential impact of such changes on continuing students, ensuring proper approvals for changes, and communicating curricular changes to students and other stakeholders. To understand fully how data affects curricular improvement, every registrar must have a basic understanding of the student-learning-assessment process.
At the end of the day, I admit that I am more of a practitioner than a scholar. It is easy to view an institution’s registrar as a bit of a “Wizard of Oz”—rarely seen but presumably doing important things. But in my experience, registrars are among the most important institutional characters, always working to maintain order, quality, compliance, and proper documentation. Registrars are, in my opinion, the Peyton Mannings of higher education.
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