Required for Accreditation. Useful for Students. Rarely Done Right.

There's a question embedded in every regional accreditation standard in the country, and it's worth asking whether most institutions are answering it as well as they think they are.

The question is deceptively simple: Do you know who your students are, and can you demonstrate that your support services were designed in response to that knowledge?

Not "do you offer advising?" Not "do you have a tutoring center?" Not "have you adopted guided pathways?" Those are fine follow-up questions. The first question is whether you have systematic evidence that you assessed your incoming students' needs — and that what you learned is actually driving how you support them.

Most institutions do something in this space. They survey students and/or conduct focus groups. They track engagement. They field satisfaction data. What's less clear is whether any of those data are being used the way the accreditor envisions — not just to make programming decisions at the population level, but to actually reach individual students with support that reflects what they specifically need. More on that in a moment.

What accreditors are actually asking for — and why it's worth taking seriously

I've worked in this space long enough to know that the instinct to treat accreditation as a compliance exercise — gather the required documentation, submit the report, get through the visit — is understandable. The workload, the bureaucracy is real, the anxiety about being evaluated ... those are all very real.

But I also think the underlying standards, particularly around student needs assessment, reflect something genuinely important. When SACSCOC says that student support services must be aligned with the needs of the student population served, that's not a bureaucratic hoop. That's a meaningful quality standard. When MSCHE calls for evidence that service design reflects the characteristics of the enrolled student population, they're asking institutions to do something that actually benefits students. The frustration tends to come not from what accreditors want but from the overhead of documenting it: the forms, the self-studies, the site visit preparation. The standard itself is asking a reasonable thing.

The accreditation environment is also raising the bar. HLC launched formal student success risk indicators in spring 2025. Institutions whose retention or completion rates fall below benchmark thresholds are now required to develop and submit Student Success Improvement Plans that show not just what the institution intends to do differently, but what evidence informed that response. MSCHE revised its evidence expectations in 2023 and is developing a 15th edition of its standards with more explicit disaggregation requirements. SACSCOC is currently revising its Principles of Accreditation with an explicit focus on student success and high-impact practices.

The direction of travel is one-way. And the question institutions should be asking isn't how to satisfy these standards minimally, but how to do the underlying thing well.

The real gap: population data versus student-level action

Here's what I actually see happening at most institutions, and I want to be careful to name it precisely because I think the framing matters. Institutions are generally not ignoring student needs data. Many are collecting it. The gap is in how those data are being used.

The dominant pattern goes something like this: survey a cohort of incoming or continuing students, aggregate the results, identify the most common themes, and use those themes to make resource and programming decisions. Seventy percent of students said they're anxious about finances, so let's make sure financial aid workshops are visible. A majority reported not knowing where to get tutoring, so let's promote the learning center more prominently. These are not bad decisions. But they are decisions made at the population level, for future cohorts, based on data that rarely reach the individual student whose response triggered the pattern in the first place.

The student who answered that survey — the one who arrived with low confidence, unclear goals, and limited sense of belonging — may have graduated or dropped out before the institution finished analyzing what they said.

That's the gap. Not that institutions don't collect data. It's that the data too often flow upward into programming and resource planning but don't flow outward to the student who needed to be reached. I often refer to these simultaneous student- and institutional-level cases as using data from the bottom-up and top-down, respectively.

The accreditor's standard is a prompt to do both. Use data to design better services, yes ... but also build a system in which the data are connected to individual students at the point when they can actually change something.

What "systematic" should actually mean

When accreditors use the word systematic, the instinct is to think they mean logical or sequential: survey a large enough sample, document the process, show it happened. And yes, that's part of it.

But I'd push the word further. A truly systematic approach to student needs assessment isn't one where you surveyed last year's students and adjusted this year's programs in response. It's one where there is an ongoing system — a process that captures what each student brings at entry, connects those data to the people and resources positioned to help, and tracks whether the connection was made and whether it worked.

There are six properties that come to mind when I think of a well-designed infrastructure:

1. Holistic — it measures a wide range of student needs, with particular attention to the factors most predictive of success. Demographic data tell you who your students are in terms of background. Satisfaction surveys tell you how they felt after the fact. Neither tells you what students brought with them at entry — the motivational orientation, the sense of belonging, the clarity of goals, the capacity to manage stress — that predicts whether they'll persist before a single grade is posted. Those noncognitive factors belong at the center of any serious needs assessment.

   
   

2. Proactive — data are collected at or near entry: before a crisis surfaces, before a student has already begun to disengage. The goal is to reach students when there's still runway, not when they're already showing up in early alert flags. As a my colleague Richard Roberts once told me, attendance isn't a predictor of attrition, it's a part of it. By the time a student stops showing up to class, they've already got one foot out the door.

3. Individualized — it generates actionable information about each student, not just population trends. An advisor (or coach, counselor, mentor... basically anyone working individually with the student) should be able to look at a student's profile and have a more informed and effective conversation because of it.

4. Actionable and connected — this is where a lot of needs assessments quietly fall short. Two conditions have to be true for data to to be truly meaningful. First, the factor being assessed has to be malleable — something that can actually change with the right intervention. Knowing that a large share of your students come from low-income backgrounds is descriptive and important, but short of direct financial relief, it doesn't tell an advisor what to do on Tuesday morning. Knowing that those same students score low on belonging or help-seeking behavior does — because those are factors that respond to targeted outreach, structured connection, and early relationship-building. Second, when a student's responses indicate a need, something has to exist to meet it. Assessment without a connected resource infrastructure is documentation, not support.

5. Institutional — it also generates aggregate data that leadership can use to understand the incoming class, allocate resources appropriately, and document the needs-assessment process that accreditors expect.

6. Longitudinal — it produces comparable data across cohorts and over time, supporting the continuous improvement cycle that every accreditor, in some form, requires.

This is not a description of a survey. It's a description of an infrastructure. And it's the distinction that separates assessment that satisfies an accreditor from assessment that actually helps students ... ideally, it's both.

Why the noncognitive dimension is particularly important

I've spent most of my career working on noncognitive student success assessment — first at ETS, where I led the field study that produced SuccessNavigator, and now through the work I do with institutions using ISSAQ. So I have an obvious perspective here. But I also think the evidence genuinely supports it.

The factors that predict whether a student persists through the first year are not primarily cognitive. They are motivational, social, and psychological: goal commitment, sense of belonging, self-efficacy, stress management, institutional fit. These are factors that vary significantly across student populations and that are not visible in transcript data, demographic profiles, or standardized test scores.

Perhaps most importantly, they are also factors that are actionable at the individual level. This matters because population-level insight — knowing that your incoming class skews low on belonging, say — tells you something useful about program design. But the student sitting across from an advisor in week two of the semester doesn't need a population trend. They need someone to understand where they are, what they're carrying, and what specific kind of support is most likely to help.

That conversation is different when the advisor has data. Not a risk score derived from GPA and demographic proxies. Actual information about how this student thinks about their goals, how they respond to stress, how connected they feel to the institution. That's what a noncognitive intake assessment produces; and it's what makes the individual-level piece of the systematic framework possible.

It's also exactly what accreditors are asking for when they want to see that support services reflect the characteristics of the students being served. An institution that can say "we assess every incoming student on twelve validated success factors, we use those data to inform advisor outreach within the first two weeks, and here is how our aggregate profile has shaped our first-year programming" has a clean answer to the accreditor's core question. More importantly, they have students who are more likely to still be enrolled at the end of the year.

The reframe worth making

Most institutions think about student success assessments as tools for the advising office or Student Affairs division. They're right — those are the core use cases. But there's a parallel institutional use that tends to be underutilized: the same assessment, administered consistently, simultaneously builds the accreditation evidence base.

When you assess incoming students systematically on meaningful success factors, you're not just generating data for advising conversations. You're building a population-level record of your students' needs at entry. You're creating documentation that your support services were designed in response to demonstrated student characteristics. You're building a continuous improvement cycle that accreditors can actually evaluate because the data exist, they're comparable across cohorts, and they connect to outcomes.

That reframe — from student success tool to student success infrastructure that also serves as accreditation evidence — changes the conversation at the leadership level. The value is no longer confined to whether advisors find the reports useful. It extends to whether the institution can answer its accreditor's core question clearly and specifically. Most institutions, right now, are answering that question with a collection of proxies and program descriptions. They could be answering it with data.

A note on what this isn't

I want to be precise about what I'm advocating. A noncognitive intake assessment is not the only evidence accreditors want, and it doesn't replace the broader apparatus of institutional effectiveness documentation. Accreditors want mission alignment, program quality, governance integrity, financial health — a comprehensive picture.

What I'm arguing is that systematic student needs assessment at entry is a specific component of that picture that many institutions treat as optional when it is, in practice, expected. And that the right assessment — supported with validity evidence, consistently administered, used at both the individual and institutional level, tracked longitudinally — produces evidence that serves the student success mission and the accreditation documentation requirement at the same time.

---

Ross Markle, Ph.D. is the founder of DIA Higher Education Collaborators and the creator of ISSAQ, a noncognitive student success assessment platform used by institutions across the country. If you'd like to talk about what systematic student intake assessment looks like in practice — and what it could mean for your institution's accreditation evidence — reach out here.