Pima Community College has made major progress addressing longstanding quality problems, but not enough yet to qualify for a clean bill of health, an accreditation review team has found.
The team is calling for PCC to remain under an accreditation sanction for another six months, contrary to the chancellor's public predictions that the sanction would be lifted.
PCC has been under sanction since 2013 for not meeting or for barely meeting quality standards in areas such as financial transparency, human resource practices and proper tracking of student learning.
"While the college had hoped to come fully off sanction, we are heartened and encouraged by the significant progress to date," Chancellor Lee Lambert said Wednesday in an email to employees.
Despite the remaining work ahead, the report contains "abundant" praise for the work the college has done to date, he noted.
The team from the Chicago-based Higher Learning Commission visited PCC in September to examine 11 areas of deficiency identified in 2015 by a different team.
The college has fully corrected five problem areas such as its previous lack of financial transparency and lack of a proven complaint-handling system, the review team found. Five others still need work, such as the previous lack of an effective program to help those weak in math, reading or writing become college-ready.
The biggest problem the current team identified is an ongoing lack of an effective system for assessing the quality of PCC programs by measuring what students have learned. That concern above all others prompted the team's recommendation to keep the college under sanction until fall 2017.Β
