Eastern Washington University is progressing in the reaffirmation process with its accreditor. At its January 28-31, 2025 meeting, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) found Eastern has successfully fulfilled three of five recommended improvements, specifically accomplishing numbers one, three and four of the list included below.
NWCCU issued the five recommendations back in January 2022. Of those, three were scheduled for review in this cycle, so Eastern remains on track.
These recommendations were reviewed in a Fall 2024 Ad Hoc report and a subsequent peer review visit. After reviewing EWU’s submission and the evaluation team’s findings, NWCCU formally accepted Eastern’s report and confirmed that our university fulfilled recommendations one, three, and four during its January 2025 meeting.
Provost Jonathan Anderson expressed his appreciation to members of the EWU community who contributed to this successful effort.
“This achievement reflects the hard work and dedication of our entire institution,” Anderson says. “I want to extend my gratitude to Jake Morrison and the Institutional Effectiveness office for their leadership in coordinating our efforts and response to NWCCU.”
A planned mid-cycle visit to review the university’s fulfillment of recommendations No. 2 and 5 has been rescheduled from spring 2025 to spring 2026, Anderson says.
The university will then submit a second report demonstrating progress in fulfilling those remaining two recommendations, and a peer evaluation team will make a site-visit to Eastern.
Here are NWCCU’s recommendations:
- Demonstrate a continuous process to assess institutional effectiveness relative to the institution’s priorities. This includes a system by which data is collected, reviewed, used to inform decision making, and utilized for allocating resources across the entire institution in a cohesive manner.
- Make further progress in our system of assessment institution-wide to evaluate the quality of learning in our programs and improve instructional programs. This is to be done by ensuring a clear path through all the assessment processes and closing the loop by using assessment results as input into resource allocation processes.
- Make publicly available select disaggregated indicators of student achievement that are clearly and systematically integrated into the assessment of institutional effectiveness.
- Review the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in academic units, Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Student Affairs with a goal to reduce redundancy and increase support designed to close equity gaps.
- Provide information verifying required course sequences and projected timelines to completion based on normal student progress and frequency of course offerings.
Here are NWCCU’s recommendations from Feb. 27, 2023. You can review all NWCCU accreditation documents by visiting our Accreditation Documents Repository.
