USDLA: Tell us about the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, or MSCHE, Annual Conference and its mission and accomplishments.

MSCHE: The Annual Conference is one of the Commission’s points of pride and an opportunity to bring us together and collaborate around the good work that the Commission does with our constituents. There are opportunities there to talk with each other both formally and informally, as well as bring together our partners around important conversations and around the challenges that we may face. As you know, we have students who come to this event, and I know we’re going to talk a little bit more about that as well. But we also provide an opportunity for our sponsor and exhibitor partners to bring to the conference how they support our institutions and to engage in conversations with us there and with our institutional representatives. We have representatives there from our institutions.

We have our state systems of higher education there. We have those from our states coming to enjoy the annual conference. And, of course, we have other higher education organizations there with us, too. For the last two years, we have had students, and it is another point of pride and a new addition for us there that has really been the highlight of so much of what that conference is really about during the conference.

USDLA: The Annual Conference exhibit hall was remarkable and a busy place. Tell us about the exhibit hall and what was new there this year.

MSCHE: The MSCHE Annual Conference exhibit hall really is a hub of activity for the conference. On the first night of the conference, we invite everyone to the exhibit hall for an opening reception. It is an active place with lots of networking taking place. The Commission’s exhibitors and sponsors are there, and they really are institutions and partners in the work that they do around accreditation. Throughout the exhibit hall, you can see lots of conversations taking place about the solutions that those sponsors and exhibitors can provide, and this year, in particular, the Commission had a very special addition to our exhibit hall. We were able to host the EdUp Experience podcast, and they were podcasting live during our conference, which was a really great opportunity for attendees this year. They were grabbing people from the crowd and asking them to interview on the podcast. Anyone who has had the opportunity to listen to that podcast knows it is an exciting experience, a very engaging podcast with lots of good conversations happening around higher education. The exhibit hall is where we host our student poster sessions, so it really is an active, exciting place where people can come together to have conversations about the important work of accreditation.

USDLA: One great feature of the MSCHE annual conference is that it showcases the research of these student scholars you’re talking about in that poster session. What was the inspiration for including the poster session, and in what other ways can students become involved in the work of your commission?

When we returned to an onsite event, we launched a call for students to consider attending our conference and presenting their research. We were not expecting as significant a response as we received, so we were very pleased with the initial reaction and response, and this year, it increased again. So we know this is something that we want to support and that we want to continue supporting. Most importantly, our institutions are supporting these efforts of our students. If we can get our students to showcase what they do in front of 1,400 people or more, that is an exceptional experience for that student. We immensely appreciate the faculty who support them, the administrators who support them, and the foundations who may support them financially so that they can attend. It is in this hub of activity where everyone is drawn to those students.

The topics are diverse, they range across disciplines, and it is so wonderful to see the overly confident students as well as those who are most nervous because it is their first time engaged in this kind of activity. We are so proud of bringing these students, and we had over 90 this year. We are excited that we have been able to grow our conference in this way and include students differently in the conversations that we are having as an accreditor, which now involves all of the great work that they do, too.

USDLA: Tell us about next year’s conference. What are your plans, and how can people register to attend?

MSCHE: We have been building on our conference every year, and it has grown to the largest audience that it has ever been. We plan to continue that with next year’s conference. We already shared our theme for next year, Protecting the Future: Champions for Higher Education, with our conference audience. That conference will occur in Philadelphia again at the Marriott Downtown, December 11-13, 2024. Registration for that conference will open later in the year. If people are interested in joining the conference, they can find more information about it by going to our website right now. They can visit msche.org/annual-conference, or they can also sign up on msche.org to receive updates from the Commission by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking subscribe. We are already planning and innovating for next year. We are looking at doing even more things you have seen this year. Our student posters will be back. The exhibit hall will be an exciting place again. Concurrent sessions will be a great source for learning and engaging with others who are doing this work in higher education.

USDLA: Tell us about MSCHE. What has the history been? What are some of your goals for the future, and how have you brought what you have done into the present?

MSCHE: What we want everyone to know, understand, and believe about accreditation is we are about relationships. We are about relationships with our regulatory partners. We are about relationships with our institutions. And we are actually in the helping profession. Because for institutions, as they navigate the changing higher education landscape, as they navigate the new demands that they may face within their states or from regulatory changes, we are here to help. One of our goals has been to ensure that everyone understands the work we do. We understand that it is complicated and that it can feel mysterious. And we want to undo some of that. We want to make sure that constituents know our purpose, know our mission, and understand how we operate within the regulatory environment, as well as an accreditor that is assisting over 500 institutions with doing what they do best so that they can certainly do it better. That is the framework, that is the goal, that has always been the goal of this commission, to drive educational excellence for the benefit of our students and our communities.

We have not strayed from that, and we have rigorous standards. We want everyone to understand what those are and how they apply. Most importantly, we, as an accrediting agency, are here to assist our institutions with the important decisions that they are making and to help them navigate what that means for them from an accreditation perspective. But we find our work and our goals stay in context, to stay relevant while we are all changing and we’re all supporting that change across our higher education communities.

USDLA: If you could share just one thing that you want our listeners to know, what would that be?

MSCHE: It is tied back to the fact that we are about relationships but also that we are more than compliance. When some think about accreditors, they are thinking about compliance primarily, and the work that we do and the accreditation activities that we support are really driven for purposes of institutional self-reflection, self-renewal, and improvement. Those activities, by design, are helping institutions do that, and as they go through accreditation activities with us, they will take time to reflect, pause, and assess the work that they’re doing to ensure that they are meeting the goals that they intend to meet. The collateral outcome is they get to demonstrate compliance with the standards, and it is supposed to be an activity that institutions can embrace and celebrate and come out at the end of that activity even stronger than they were going into it all for the benefit of the students.

USDLA: Tell us a little bit about how it has changed over the years from being kind of the report card for the university and how change is impacting what the future looks like.

MSCHE: The Commission is in a constant state of change, just like our institution. We are evaluating the accreditation process. We are evaluating the accreditation activities. We are making changes around our standards, and we have seen significant changes just in recent years as well. We recently adopted the next iteration of our standards, and we are beginning to implement those. We are very proud of that work, and our institutions and all of our constituents contributed to those changes. The standards belong to all of us. They are what we have all indicated we want to be, the measurement of rigor and success for our institutions. We have also had changes in process, and we do things very differently now than we did even five years ago or ten years ago. We do that in collaboration and partnership with our institutions. We do not do it in isolation, but we, too, learn each and every year from our accreditation processes, from the activities that we see, and from the challenges that we are seeing. So when we talk about the future of higher education, we are talking about all of the great work that we know is yet to come—all of the changes that our institutions embrace for the benefit of their students.

But we are also talking about the realities of closures, mergers, and acquisitions, of really difficult conversations as institutions self-reflect and decide how we are going to approach what our students need, and how we are going to approach our sustainability in the future. What financial challenges do we see on the horizon? Institutions, as they go through those conversations, are going to be looking our way for best practices and good models that we know we have around some of those really tough decisions that institutions have to consider and face in the years ahead.