FEDERATION OF ACCREDITING AGENCIES IN THE PHILIPPINES

1. JEAN AILLEN F. SOLTES

2. Accreditation is …
 A process by which institutions or programs
continuously upgrade their educational quality and
service through self-evaluation and the judgment of peers.
 A concept based on self-regulation which focuses on
evaluation and the continuing reinforcement of
educational quality.
 A status granted to an educational institution or
programs which meets commonly accepted standards of
quality or excellence.

3. a.) its prevailing sense of volunteerism
b.) its strong tradition of self-
regulation
c.) its reliance on evaluation
techniques
d.) its primary concern with quality

4.  Based on accepted standards
Each school seeking accreditation will be surveyed and evaluated in
terms of the appropriateness and adequacy of its philosophy and
objectives and its terms of the degree and competence and which it
achieves its goals.
 Concerned with the teacher-learner relationship
 Provides opportunities for institutional growth through self-survey
and evaluation and self-regulation.
 Admits periodic review, criticism, and readjustment of its criteria,
policies and procedures to changes in education.

5.  Accrediting agencies judge an institution
not by comparison with other
institutions but primarily by the degree
to which each institution’s own avowed
philosophy and objectives, vision-mission
are matched by actual practice in the
various areas being evaluated.

6.  “Program Accreditation,” refers to the accreditation of
academic courses such as liberal arts, sciences, education,
commerce, law, engineering, nursing, etc. PAASCU’s policy
extends accreditation by program.
 “Institutional Accreditation,” refers to the accreditation of the
school, college, universities or institution as a whole. Under
PAASCU policy, institutional accreditation is not undertaken
by itself; only individual programs are accredited. Only when
all the programs of an institution are accredited may that
particular institution be considered an accredited institution
under the PAASCU policy.

7. 1. FAAP (Federation of Accrediting Agencies of the Philippines
2. PAASCU ( Philippine Accrediting Association of Schools, Colleges, and
Universities)
3. AACCUP (Accrediting Association of Chartered Colleges and Universities in the
Philippines)
4. PACUCOA (Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities Commission on
Accreditation)
5. ACSC-AAI (Association of Christian Schools and College-Accrediting Agency,
Incorporated)
6. IQUAME (Institutional Monitoring Evaluation for Quality Assurance)

8. On the collegiate and secondary levels, the following areas are evaluated:
1. College/School Community 5. Laboratories
Involvement 6. Physical Plant
2. Faculty 7. Student Services
3. Instruction 8. Administration
4. Library
On the grade school level, the library and laboratories (no. 4 and no. 5 above) are
omitted; instead, Student Activity Program is added.

9.  In 1994, the Department of Education was reorganized by an act of Congress into
three separate entities: (1) the Department of Education for primary, secondary,
and other forms of basic education; (2) the Technical-Vocational Education and
Skills Development Authority for vocational skills training; and (3) the
Commission on Higher Education for college and university studies.
 Commission on Higher Education had to walk a tightrope between under-
regulation and over-regulation. On the one hand a need existed to establish
minimum requirements and standards, especially as this was provided for in law
with respect to for-profit institutions. Hence stringent requirements were
imposed on institutions for the initial “permit” period, prior to their official
“recognition” and being allowed to grant degrees.
 These requirements included minimum standards for size of campus, library
holdings, laboratory facilities, the percentage of faculty with advanced degrees,
and so on. In addition government prescribed in detail the number of credit hours
required in subject areas for each degree program, which all institutions were
required to follow to gain recognition for the degree.

10.  In 1949, the Department of Education issued the first public
statement suggesting that quality assurance through private sector
accreditation would be necessary to preserve, if not enhance, good
tertiary education.
 However, the private sector did not act to implement an
accreditation process until 1951, when Francisco Dalupan, the
President of one of the largest universities in Manila, University of
the East, acting on his familiarity with United States style
accreditation, brought together several equally knowledgeable to
pursue the subject. This group formed the unfortunately short-lived
(1951-52) Philippine Accrediting Association of Universities and
Colleges (PAAUC), welcoming all three major professional
associations of private colleges and universities to join them. These
were:
 A Catholic group represented by the Catholic Educational Association of the
Philippines (CEAP)
 A protestant group, the Association of Christian Schools and Colleges (ACSC)
 A non-sectarian, for stock and for-profit group, embodied in the Philippine Association

11.  The remaining Catholic association, CEAP, however continued to
pursue accreditation within its own ranks. It formed an Accrediting
Committee in 1954 and after field-testing PAAUC’s standards and
criteria, developed a self-survey form, a question-and-answer list to
evaluate an institution’s operations.
 By the end of 1957 eleven prestigious Catholic HEIs had
successfully completed such reviews. However, instead of
constituting the new CEAP accrediting association, this initial group
believed it a wiser course to incorporate separately as a private,
voluntary, non-profit and non-stock organization that came to be
known as the Philippine Accrediting Association of Schools, Colleges
and Universities, or PAASCU. It registered with the Securities and
Exchange Commission on December 2, 1957, declaring its
independence from CEAP’s structure.

12. The Department of Education officially recognized
PAASCU as an accrediting agency, and eventually offered
certain privileges, one of which was to exempt its
accredited member HEIs from the requirement of
obtaining government oversight of the graduation process.
With government continuing to support the idea of
private, voluntary accreditation, PAASCU specifically
invited both non-Catholic and non-sectarian colleges and
universities to become members, to avoid the perception
that it was only for private Catholic HEIs.

13.  Federation of Accrediting Associations of the Philippines (FAAP) in
1977, a body intended by then Education Secretary Jaime Laya to
become a super-body of accrediting agencies in the form of a
federation.
 By 1979, the Ministry of Education recognized FAAP, and in 1984
gave it, through the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports
(MECS) Order No. 36, the power to certify, a role traditionally taken
by the individual accrediting agencies. The more recently activated
associations, ACSC-AA and PACU-COA, were no match for
PAASCU’s expertise and size. PAASCU was to be the lead
accrediting agency, a status owed to its 20-plus years of experience
in the field.

14.  FAAP gave equal amounts of funding to all three accrediting institutions for
political expediency at the price of ignoring the organizational strengths,
weaknesses and specific needs of each. This resulted in the two newer associations
occupying the majority bloc of the FAAP, capable of outvoting PAASCU, despite
the fact that the latter possessed more experience and in-depth knowledge of the
quality assurance process. Differences also existed between the sectarian-based
association of ACSC-AA and the non-sectarian, mostly for-profit orientation of
PACU-COA members, though they jointly occupied 66% of the membership in
FAAP. As described earlier, the profit motive took priority over quality
considerations. These two associations also insisted on comprehensive
institutional accreditation, rather than program accreditation, as the basis for the
accreditation judgment.
 PAASCU had long pursued a program-based model. It argued that institutional
accreditation would allow weak programs to be masked by stronger ones. Such
“protective coloring” could act in turn as a disincentive to quality improvement
efforts by weaker programs. PAASCU was willing to concede that institutional
accreditation was worth awarding if a majority of programs within an institution
were individually accredited. Obviously, sorting weaker from stronger programs
within institutional settings, was in and of itself, no easy task.

15.  A new Minister of Education Culture and Sports was appointed.
She was Lourdes Quisumbing, President of the prestigious Miriam
College, and an active PAASCU Director. She quickly indicated her
support for voluntary accreditation by promulgating Department
Order No. 27 which superseded Ministry Order No. 36 of 1984.
Under DO 27 FAAP was to serve as a coordinator and funder of
accreditation activities in association with FAPE. FAAP would
merely certify accreditation actions taken by various accrediting
agencies, which DECS would then formally recognize. This would
make the newly accredited HEI eligible for progressive government
benefits.
 Under the new dispensation of President Aquino, the Department of
Education authorized FAAP to develop four levels of accreditation,
and accordingly develop four levels of incentives and deregulations,
according to which accredited programs would be exempt from
various aspects of DECS bureaucratic requirements, depending on
the levels of accredited status earned. This included rules on
increases in tuition fees, the lifeblood of most HEIs. If accredited,
an HEI would have more leeway in setting its own rates, and be

16.  State chartered colleges and universities had grown from 86 in 1990
to 125 in 2008. They were banded together as the Philippine
Association of State Universities and Colleges, or PASUC.
 In 1987 these public institutions established the Accrediting Agency
of Chartered Colleges and Universities of the Philippines
(AACCUP), establishing their own standards. The presumption was
that the private sector could not fully understand the regulatory
environment governing public institutions. Given that many of these
institutions had been established primarily as vanity institutions for
local politicians, the concern over meeting current high quality
standards was real. If they failed in the evaluation process, they
would face sanctions, and maybe closure.
 By 2005 this public sub-sector had grown large enough that CHED
recognized the existence of the National Network of Quality
Accrediting Agencies (NNQAA) made up of AACCUP and a second
accrediting network called the Association of Local Colleges and
Universities Commission on Accreditation (ALCUCOA).

17.  CHED was to take a more active role in the oversight of the accrediting system--in
fact it was to be responsible for certifying institutional status granted by the
accrediting agencies, thus proposing to withdraw this authority from FAAP.
CHED formalized the role and relationships among CHED, FAAP and the
accrediting agencies, to wit: “CHED shall authorize federations/networks of
accrediting agencies to certify to CHED the accredited status of
programs/institutions granted by their member accrediting agencies and in
accordance with their own standards, as accepted by the CHED, for granting
benefits to institutions/programs at various accredited levels..”
 The institutional process linkage operates as follows:
Govt. agency Federation Accrediting agency member Individual
Member
CHED --------------------FAAP ------------ PAASCU or ------------------- HEI
ACS-AA or
PACU-COA

18.  PAASCU turned 50 years of age in 2007. 255 higher education institutions have
gone or are going through their accreditation process. The other two major
agencies, PACU-COA and ACSC-AA, have processed over a hundred additional
HEIs. Still, as reported by CHED, this represents less than half of all private
higher education institutions. Nevertheless, a momentum has built up, and the
numbers of applicant institutions in increasing steadily.
 The agencies themselves are rapidly developing. PAASCU, clearly the lead
agency, has established credibility internationally. It was a founding member of
the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education
(INQAAHE), established in 1991. As of 2006, this network includes 150
accrediting agencies from over 60 different countries.

19.  PAASCU is also a founding member of the Asia Pacific Quality
Network (APQN), a regional network of higher education quality
assurance associations, established in January 2003. Today it
includes members from 51 countries or territories across Asia and
the Pacific. PAASCU has invited staff from Cambodia’s Ministry of
Education to the Philippines to observe its whole accreditation
system and process. It continues to be invited to assist the
development of accreditation in neighboring countries.
 The other major accreditation agencies of the country, under the
sustained and effective guidance of FAAP, have had similar
successes and have become more stringent in their requirements.
The technical committees for specific program areas, galvanized by
the recommendation of the 2000 Presidential Commission on
Education Reform, have come a long way towards a common
standardization of their criteria, instrumentation and processes.
Even the for-profit institutions now recognize that investing in
quality for accreditation does not diminish returns, but increases
their image and attracts more students, and thus bringing in even
greater revenue.