Abstract
Accreditation is an ongoing process managed by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), aimed at maintaining quality standards in HEIs. State universities with external campuses undergo both program and institutional accreditation, with faculty playing key roles in ensuring quality. The dissertation aimed to determine the perspectives on program accreditation of faculty from state university external campuses. The lived experiences of the faculty were drawn by getting their responses to the three research questions that delved into the program accreditation experiences, challenges encountered, and the participant’s views on how to prepare their campus for the next program accreditation. This qualitative research used the hermeneutic phenomenological design. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews. Triangulation was made to validate the data using field notes, reflexive journals, documentary analysis, and validation from other data sources. The data collection procedures were meticulously performed. Data gathered were analyzed following the Thematic Analysis procedures by Moustakas (1994) and the use of QDA miner software. From the analyses, six themes emerged: Experience-Based Definitions and Impressions on Program Accreditation, Work in Accreditation: The Overkill, Challenges Encountered in Program Accreditation, Causes of Program Accreditation Issues, Applied Strategies in Overcoming Accreditation Challenges, and Towards a Successful Program Accreditation: Bolman and Deal’s Four-Frame Model. From these themes and the theoretical underpinnings of the study, it was found that the perspectives of faculty on program accreditation differ based on their experiences. The faculty had clear ideas on how difficult the work in accreditation is, the problems they encountered, the reasons why the challenges were met, the strategies they applied to overcome the challenges, and their set of recommendations that were classified by the researcher using the Bolman and Deal’s Four-Frame Model.
