Dear Cook Community,
Central to our students' experience of a quality Rutgers education, each accredited program, at fairly regular intervals, must complete rigorous program and learning goals, plan measurable program objectives and report student learning outcomes to maintain accreditation. At the School, we've been in a very busy season of reviews of several of our accredited academic programs.
The Bioenvironmental Engineering Undergraduate (BEE) Program was reaccredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) this past summer. The BEE Program operates under the umbrella of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the School and is administered jointly by the School and the Rutgers School of Engineering. Since changing its name from Bioresource Engineering in 2006, this popular and dynamic program has grown from 27 students enrolled in 2006 to 91 students enrolled today.
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 Our highly regarded undergraduate landscape architecture program, the only such accredited program in New Jersey, was successfully re-accredited in 2012. Just last week, its graduate program completed the final phase of evaluation towards its accreditation. The evaluation of first-professional programs in landscape architecture at the bachelor's and master's levels in the U.S. and territories is conducted by the Landscape Architecture Accreditation Board (LAAB). Institutional accreditation, essential to any licensed landscape architect, requires meeting seven criteria of performance andincludes a comprehensive self-evaluation report and a three-day visit by an accreditation team, which gave strong praise to the department on all seven criteria. The team will summarize its findings and make recommendations to the LAAB board, which is expected to grant accreditation to the graduate landscape architecture program at its next meeting in February 2014. |
Every 10 years, the Didactic Program in Dietetics, an option in the Nutritional Sciences major, submits a self-study based upon education standards developed by the Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics (ACEND). Using regular dietetics practice audits, program compliance with ACEND education standards certify that the educational requirements to prepare students to practice as registered dietitians are science-based and appropriate to meet the challenges of the profession. Accreditation by ACEND is the benchmark for quality of education in nutrition and dietetics and assures current students, program graduates and the public that the dietetics program is a reliable authority in the field. The program was granted full accreditation in November 2013 and has experienced an overall growth of 33% in the ten years since initial accreditation was granted.
I wish to thank the programs whose community of faculty, staff and students performed the rigorous self-study, and moreover, kept their commitments from previous accreditations to keep raising the bar on our own performance to offer high-quality and relevant educational experiences for all our students. |
