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Selection Criteria For

Educational Accreditation

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Distinctive Accreditation Blueprint

The core goal of GSAAA is to encourage educational institutions to hold themselves accountable for enhancing instruction and providing best practices through a dedication to strategic management, learner success, and influential thought leadership. This is accomplished through defining standards and criteria, coordinating audit reviews and consultations, and identifying excellent educational institutions that comply with the process and actively participate in it.

To initiate the accreditation procedure, an educational institution must fulfill the prerequisites and show that it can reasonably align with GSAAA accreditation requirements in the allotted maximum period.

Following form submission, the institute formally begins the initial accreditation process, which is led and assisted by the accreditation committee as the institute works toward accreditation. The institute is assessed for compliance with the GSAAA's accreditation standards throughout the initial accreditation process through board review and self-evaluation. The institute is subject to recurring peer assessments following accreditation to determine its long-term quality, perpetual growth, and compliance with the accreditation criteria.

Key Attributes of a Good Accreditation Board

  • Independent
  • Key stakeholders’ representation
  • Good governance
  • Transparent decisions
  • Clear policy and requirements
  • Effective and efficient physical visits
  • Professional decision-making process
  • Benchmark with the highest international standards
  • Certified accreditation criteria
  • Competent, well-trained chapter members

Accreditation Criteria

The accreditation criteria consist of three sections:

  1. Creative Leadership and Strategic Management,
  2. Academic Progress
  3. Intellectual Influence, Participation, and Societal Implications.

Each section contains standards that, when met, lead institutes to make a positive individual impact. The combined impact across all GSAAA Council-accredited institutes moves GSAAA Council toward achieving its vision of transforming education for positive societal impact. GSAAA Council believes that a wide range of missions can be consistent with high quality, positive impact, and innovation. Such success is achieved when institutes are clear about their priorities and when their mission, strategies, and expected outcomes are internally aligned.

Creative Leadership & Strategic Management

Strategic management encompasses the entire range of activities an educational institute engages in to fulfill its mission and informs the institute on resource management. The primary documentation is the strategic plan, which all accredited institutes are expected to have as a principal artifact for the review team to examine. The strategic plan provides a basis for the composition of the institute’s intellectual contribution portfolio, the identification of the audit committee, and the institute’s aspirations. The strategic plan identifies the institute’s mission, strategic initiatives, goals, objectives, tactics, and metrics for success and is created with input from key stakeholders. Ensuring financial vitality from an operational and strategic perspective is also critical to strategic management. Additionally, an essential component of a GSAAA Council-accredited institution is how the institute will contribute meaningfully both to connecting education with practice and to fostering and promoting societal impact consistent with the GSAAA Council’s vision. This section provides standards that guide institutes in the process of meaningful strategic management, including standards around creating and maintaining a strategic plan, managing all resources, and ensuring the overall financial health of the accredited institute or unit.

  • 1.1 The institute maintains a well-documented strategic plan developed through a robust and collaborative planning process involving key stakeholders’ input that informs the institute on resource allocation priorities. The strategic plan should also articulate the institute's clear and focused mission.
  • 1.2 The institute regularly monitors its progress against its planned strategies and expected outcomes and communicates its progress to key stakeholders. As part of monitoring, the institute conducts formal risk analysis and has plans to mitigate identified significant risks.
  • 1.3 As the institute carries out its mission, it embraces innovation as a critical element of continuous improvement.
  • 1.4 The institute demonstrates a commitment to positive societal impact as expressed in and supported by its focused mission and specifies how it intends to achieve this impact.

The institute manages its physical, virtual, and financial resources to sustain the institute on an ongoing basis and to promote a high-quality environment that fosters the success of all participants in support of the institute’s mission, strategies, and expected outcomes.

  • 3.1 The institute maintains and strategically deploys sufficient participating and supporting faculty who collectively demonstrate significant academic and professional engagement, which helps high-quality outcomes consistent with the institute’s mission.
  • 3.2 Faculty are qualified through initial academic or professional preparation and sustain currency and relevancy appropriate to their classification, as follows: Scholarly Academic (SA), Practice Academic (PA), Scholarly Practitioner (SP), or Instructional Practitioner (IP). Otherwise, faculty members are classified as Additional Faculty (A).
  • 3.3 Sufficient professional staff are available to ensure high-quality support for faculty and learners.
  • 3.4 The institute has well-documented and well-communicated processes to manage, develop, and support faculty and professional staff throughout their careers consistent with its mission, strategies, and expected outcomes.

Academic Progress

This section of the accreditation standards is designed to ensure learners' success in the degree programs and other learning experiences the institute provides. The measures in this section address these critical areas of teaching and learning. High-quality educational institutes have processes for ensuring that learners acquire the competencies to achieve successful outcomes in line with the institute's mission and develop a lifelong learning mindset to ensure continued success. These processes include curriculum and program management informed by a systematic assurance of learning. Educational institutes should have assessment processes in the portfolio of validation of learning tools that will ensure the currency and relevancy of the curriculum. Competency goals should be designed and assessed to maximize the potential for achieving expected outcomes. Teaching should be linked to competency goals, and processes should be in place to ensure faculty deliver a high-quality educational experience. Curricula and extracurricular programs should be innovative and foster engagement among learners, between learners and faculty, and with professional practice.

  • 4.1 The institute delivers current, relevant, forward-looking, globally-oriented content aligned with program competency goals and consistent with its mission, strategies, and expected outcomes. The curriculum content cultivates agility with current and emerging technologies.
  • 4.2 The institute manages its curriculum through assessment and other systematic review processes to ensure currency, relevancy, and competency.
  • 4.3 The institute’s curriculum fosters innovation, experiential learning, and a lifelong learning mindset. Program elements promoting positive societal impact are included within the curriculum.
  • 4.4 The institute’s curriculum facilitates meaningful learner-to-learner and learner-to-faculty academic and professional engagement.

  • 5.1 The institute uses well-documented assurance of learning (AoL) processes that include direct and indirect measures for ensuring the quality of all degree programs deemed in scope for accreditation purposes. The institute’s AoL work results lead to curricular and process improvements.
  • 5.2 Programs resulting in the same degree credential are structured and designed to ensure equivalence of high-quality outcomes irrespective of location and modality of instructional delivery.
  • 5.3 Micro learning credentials that are “stackable” or can be combined into a GSAAA Council-accredited degree program should include processes to ensure high quality and continuous improvement
  • 5.4 Non-degree executive education that generates over five percent of an institute’s annual resources should include processes to ensure high quality and continuous improvement.

  • 6.1 The institute has policies and procedures for admissions, acceptance of transfer credit, academic progression toward degree completion, and support for career development that are clear, compelling, consistently applied, and aligned with the institute's mission, strategies, and expected outcomes.
  • 6.2 Post-graduation success is consistent with the institute’s mission, strategies, and expected outcomes. Public disclosure of academic program quality supporting learner progression and post-graduation success occurs on a current and consistent basis.

  • 7.1 The institute has a systematic, multi-measure assessment process for ensuring the quality of teaching and its impact on learner success.
  • 7.2 The institute has development activities in place to enhance faculty teaching and ensure that teachers can deliver a curriculum that is current, relevant, forward-looking, globally oriented, innovative, and aligned with program competency goals.
  • 7.3 Faculty are current in their discipline and pedagogical methods, including teaching diverse perspectives in an inclusive environment. Faculty demonstrate a lifelong learning mindset, as supported and promoted by the institute.
  • 7.4 The institute demonstrates teaching impact through learner success, satisfaction, and other affirmations of teaching expertise.

Intellectual Influence, Participation, and Societal Implications

The defining feature of quality educational institutes is that they make a significant difference through educational activities, thought leadership, and engagement with external stakeholders. Quality educational institutes create and disseminate intellectual contributions that impact the theory, practice, and teaching and positively impact society. Often, these contributions result from engagement with the broader community that facilitates the co-creation of knowledge and ensures the relevance, usefulness, and impact of the institute’s intellectual contributions. Achieving this impact requires an institute to have a clear focus and direction for its thought leadership that aligns with its mission. Further, high-quality educational institutes have a positive societal impact by addressing broader social, economic, business, and physical environment issues, which could be at a local, regional, national, or international scale. This impact results from internal and external initiatives and aligns with educational institutes as a force for good in society. Within this context, interdisciplinary work becomes essential to achieving goals that significantly impact the community. Thus, multidisciplinary work is encouraged and applauded. This section contains two standards. The first standard focuses on the production, dissemination, and impact of the institute’s thought leadership related to scholarship. In contrast, the second assesses an institute’s engagement with and impact on society.

  • 8.1 The institute’s faculty collectively produce high-quality, impactful intellectual contributions that, over time, develop into mission-consistent areas of thought leadership.
  • 8.2 The institute collaborates with various external stakeholders to create and transfer credible, relevant, and timely knowledge that informs the theory, policy, and business practice to develop into mission-consistent areas of thought leadership for the institute.
  • 8.3 The institute’s portfolio of intellectual contributions contains exemplars of basic, applied, and pedagogical research that have had a positive societal impact, consistent with the institute’s mission.

  • 9.1 The institute demonstrates positive societal impact through internal and external initiatives and activities consistent with the institute’s mission, strategies, and expected outcomes.