The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is one of six official academic bodies responsible for the accreditation of public and private universities, colleges, secondary and elementary schools in the United States and foreign institutions of American origin. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges has jurisdiction over the U.S. states of California and Hawaii, its territories of Guam, American Samoa and Northern Marianas Islands, in addition to the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, the Pacific Rim, East Asia, and areas of the Pacific and East Asia where American schools or colleges may apply to it for service.
Western Association of Schools and Colleges is divided into three groups. The Accrediting Commission for Schools accredits all schools below the college level. Included are elementary, junior high, middle, high and adult schools, whether public, private, or church-related. The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges evaluates and accredits public and private post-secondary institutions that offer two-year education programs and award the associate degree. The Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities accredits public and private senior colleges and universities.
Famous quotes containing the words western, association, schools and/or colleges:
“trying to live in the terrible western world
here where to love at all’s to be a politician, as to love a poem
is pretentious,”
—Frank O’Hara (1926–1966)
“An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)