PCC Accreditation Reaffirmed

Pasadena City College has been restored to full accreditation status, Superintendent-President Rajen Vurdien, Ph.D., announced in a campuswide email today.

The news came in a letter from the Accrediting Comission for Community and Junior Colleges, which oversees standards and practices for two-year institutions affiliated with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. The letter stated that PCC had met every recommendation identified in a Spring 2015 review of the college’s operations and governing structure.

“The news delivered by the commission this week shows that we have turned a page at PCC,” Vurdien said. “Our faculty, administration, and staff came together to respond to the commission’s recommendations, and our efforts have made us a a stronger college. The benefits of this work will be paid to students in our region for years to come.”

The Commission has a number of levels of sanction against institutions under its area of responsibility, including Warning, Probation, Show Cause, and Termination. PCC’s probationary status reflected concerns about its administrative structure and governance organization, but included no negative indication of its academic performance or quality of education. The college remained fully accredited during the Commission’s period of increased scrutiny, and was in fact recognized multiple times for academic excellence — including, late last year, earning the title of Aspen Prize Top 10 Community College.

“Many people at the college have worked extremely hard over the last year-and-a-half to make improvements in the administrative areas that the accreditation commission said were needed,” said Ross Selvidge, Ph.D., president of the PCC Board of Trustees, in an interview with Pasadena Now. “I am pleased to report that the standards for quality of instruction that our students have and will continue to receive have been evaluated and verified.”

The college’s next accreditation report is due in March of 2018.

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