How to Work with an Accreditation Consultant

Hiring an accreditation consultant is one of the few decisions a PA program makes where timing matters more than selection. A well-matched consultant brought in twelve months before an application is doing triage. The same consultant brought in twenty-four months out is building something. This guide covers when a program actually needs outside help, how long the work takes, what belongs in the agreement, and the one responsibility a program can never hand off. It is part of our Building, Growing & Leading a PA Program pillar.

Last reviewed August 2026. Standards references reflect the ARC-PA Standards, Sixth Edition.

What does an accreditation consultant actually do?

A consultant is an outside expert hired for a defined project who brings a perspective your program cannot generate internally. At Massey & Associates Consulting Solutions the engagement is usually a team rather than one person, but the function is the same in either case.

The work falls into a few categories. There is education: helping a program understand what the standards require and where the resources are. There is specialized advice, filtered through your program's mission and structure rather than delivered generically, because a recommendation that fits a 40-seat program at a health-science university may be wrong for a 90-seat program inside a liberal arts college. There is mentorship, which extends past the program director to faculty who will lead later. There are examples and templates that give a program a starting point instead of a blank page. And there is process work: building the compliance-monitoring rhythm the program will run after the engagement ends.

The category programs underestimate is risk identification. A consultant reads policies, documents, and the program website critically and looks for the gap between what a program believes it does and what its documentation demonstrates. Long-standing practice is where this bites hardest. "Don't fix what ain't broke" is a reasonable operating philosophy right up until the standards change underneath it, and by then the practice has years of momentum and nobody in the program is positioned to question it.

What is a consultant not responsible for?

The outcome. Your program submits the application, hosts the site visit, and demonstrates compliance. A consultant recommends; the program decides whether the recommendation fits and then implements it. A consultant also does not determine whether you are compliant. That determination belongs to ARC-PA, and when a question is genuinely unsettled the Commission is the correct place to take it.

This boundary is easy to state and easy to forget under deadline pressure. A story from a friend who spent years as a legal secretary makes it concrete. Attorneys submit briefs to a judge. When a judge finds an error, an attorney who says "that was my secretary's mistake" gets asked whose signature is at the bottom of the document. The answer is always the attorney's, and so the mistake is always the attorney's. The same judge will not accept "my clerk wrote that argument, so I'm not sure what it means."

ARC-PA reads your report the same way. If a consultant helped draft narratives or assemble exhibit files, the program is still the party responsible for finding inaccuracies, catching missing data, correcting a benchmark that does not hold up, and explaining how it arrived at every area needing improvement and every declared strength. A program that has not made the document its own will discover that during interviews, which is the worst possible moment. Bringing a consultant in early is partly about leaving enough time for the program to do exactly this: proofread, re-check the data, compare narratives against the evidence files, and be able to defend the reasoning without notes.

How do you know your program needs one?

Start by assuming the answer might be yes even if nothing is visibly wrong. Programs in their first years usually know they need help. Programs that have operated successfully for twenty years are the ones that get surprised, and the condition that produces the surprise is worth naming: losing focus.

There are recognizable ways it happens.

No monitoring process. If nothing in the program's calendar assigns someone the job of tracking standards changes and updating practice accordingly, compliance erodes quietly rather than dramatically.

Turnover in waves. Faculty turnover is normal. Turnover concentrated over two or three years is different, because it can leave a program where no current principal faculty member has been through an accreditation cycle. Short staffing compounds it, since redistributed responsibilities are the first thing to get done at minimum viable quality.

A new or newly promoted program director. Directors are frequently promoted from within, from faculty roles that never required deep accreditation involvement. Some have never been through a site visit at all.

Institutional change. A new president or provost may have no background in PA education and no working sense of what the standards demand. Institutional priorities shift. Resource availability changes for reasons entirely outside the institution's control, as 2020 demonstrated for everyone at once. The compliance obligation does not move with any of it.

Disconnect from administration. One of the ironies of this work is that PA programs are often too competent for their own good. They solve their own problems, they get their students educated, and they gradually stop involving the institution. The institution, seeing no problem, stops checking in. Both sides are comfortable and the program is unsupported, which becomes visible only when a standard requires documented institutional engagement.

Probation. This is losing focus in its most complete form, and it is not a state a program can wait out. An outside perspective is genuinely useful here, because the problems ARC-PA identified are usually the ones the program had stopped being able to see. Our Accreditation Findings & Remediation pillar covers that situation directly.

Time itself. Technology, clinical practice, and student expectations have all moved substantially in twenty years. What was sufficient a decade ago is a weak baseline now.

How much lead time do you actually need?

Twelve to fifteen months from application submission is the floor. Eighteen to twenty-four months is what I recommend, and the recommendation is not padding.

The reason is that none of this work happens in isolation from the program. Faculty are teaching, students are rotating, admissions cycles are running, and the accreditation project has to fit around all of it. A two-year runway gives a program room to do the work at a sustainable pace. A one-year runway turns the project into a series of emergencies, which is when quality drops and people burn out.

I work with programs in waves. We go deep on one component, then stop and let the program breathe and run itself for a while, then start the next wave. Taking challenges one at a time is manageable. Waiting until the last year and then facing everything simultaneously is not. That wave will knock you flat.

If your program has genuinely lost focus, add time rather than subtracting it. Recovery work always takes longer than maintenance work.

What should you decide before you sign anything?

Scope, first. Do you need a document review and nothing more? Hourly consulting on specific questions as they arise? Or a retainer relationship where someone walks alongside the program across the full cycle and is available longitudinally? These are different engagements at different prices, and a program that has not thought about which one it needs tends to buy the wrong one.

Then the agreement itself. Seven things are worth settling explicitly before work starts.

1. Deliverables. Due dates for everything, including documents, narratives, and website reviews. Dates are what create cadence.
2. Accountability. Who is responsible for which piece, named.
3. Flexibility. This work is iterative and it can feel repetitive. Documents come back with edits more than once. ARC-PA may issue new guidance mid-engagement that reopens a component you thought was closed. Expect the feeling and understand that it is the nature of the work rather than a sign something has gone wrong.
4. Communication. How meetings, email, and calls will run, and how often.
5. Transparency. An agreement that problems get raised early, from either side.
6. Honesty. You should be direct about what you expected from the engagement. Your consultant will sometimes have to deliver news about your program that you did not want. The productive response is to accept the finding and move to solutions.
7. Transformation. Everyone involved should treat this as a framework for the program's future rather than a one-time submission exercise. Sometimes the outcome is confirmation that your processes are sound, which is a real result.

There is also a mindset requirement that no agreement can create. You have to be willing to work hard, weigh recommendations against your own mission and structure, and actually implement change. A consultant cannot do the work for you or make the problems disappear. What outside help does is make sure the effort you are already spending lands in the right places.

Is your team actually bought in?

Compliance is usually treated as the program director's job. It is not, and a consultant's most useful structural contribution is often making that visible to everyone else.

A short self-audit tells you where you stand. Does your admissions committee consider the admissions standards when it sets requirements and makes acceptance decisions, or does it defer to the program director for direction? Do committee members know the fair-practice and website expectations that attach to admissions? Does your curriculum committee examine syllabi and lectures with accreditation in view, and can it adapt an institutional syllabus template to meet the standards? Do faculty understand the chain that runs from competencies through course learning outcomes and instructional objectives to assessment methods, or are they following instructions without knowing why? Does senior administration understand its own obligations, and what happens if the institution does not meet them?

Where the answers are weak, it is frequently not resistance. Program directors carry an enormous load, student issues legitimately take precedence, and assessment is the work that quietly slips. Sometimes it simply takes an outside voice to validate what a program director has been saying internally for years.

Personally, this is why I recommend it

I am the founding program director of the PA program at Saint Elizabeth University, and I have been through the Initial Provisional Application process twice. The first time I did not succeed. I learned from it and spent a lot of time reflecting on why. The second time I worked with a consultant, and it went differently.

The practical help mattered. The advice held me accountable and produced timelines and processes that kept compliance on track. But the part I did not anticipate was having someone outside the institution who understood what I was going through. I could use that person as a sounding board for operational and personnel questions that had nothing directly to do with accreditation, and having their perspective and experience available changed how I saw problems I had been sitting inside of for months.

What does a good engagement leave behind?

A program that does not need the consultant anymore.

The test comes after the contract ends. Are faculty and staff participating without being overwhelmed? Is data collection understood and performed routinely rather than heroically? Does tabulated data have a clear path to the analysis stage? Does the analysis actually produce information someone acts on? Does each committee see the data relevant to its own responsibility instead of everything or nothing? Is an annual retreat on the calendar, so the whole team looks at the big picture together and participates in deciding what counts as an area needing improvement and what counts as a strength?

Underneath all of it is whether self-assessment has become something the program understands rather than performs. The five questions of C1.01 and the two questions of C1.02 are the current shape of that work, and the framing I return to with programs is a set of plain questions: why you are assessing (evidence of compliance, and a way to test whether what you believe about your program is true), what you collect (direct outcomes data and indirect stakeholder data, including the medical director evaluation programs routinely forget), when you collect and analyze it, who owns each step, and how the collation, benchmarking, and triangulation actually happen. Programs that can answer those without reaching for a binder are the ones that stay compliant between visits.

If your program is somewhere on the runway and trying to work out how much help it needs, talk to our team. The answer is sometimes less than you think, and it is almost always sooner.

Frequently asked questions

When should a PA program hire an accreditation consultant?
At minimum twelve to fifteen months before an application is due, and preferably eighteen to twenty-four. Programs should also consider outside help outside of a submission cycle when they have had heavy faculty turnover, a newly promoted program director, an institutional leadership change, or no defined process for tracking standards updates.

What does an accreditation consultant do for a PA program?
Provides education on the standards, program-specific advice filtered through your mission and structure, mentorship for the director and faculty, templates and exemplars, process design for ongoing compliance monitoring, and critical review of policies, documents, and the program website to find gaps before a review team does.

Can a consultant guarantee that a PA program will be found compliant?
No. A consultant can make informed recommendations, but the final determination of compliance belongs to ARC-PA. The program owns its application, its analysis, and its outcome, and is expected to be able to explain its own reasoning without relying on the consultant who helped draft it.

How do you know if your PA program has lost focus on accreditation?
Common indicators are the absence of any process for monitoring standards changes, concentrated faculty turnover that leaves nobody with site-visit experience, a director promoted without full accreditation exposure, a new provost or president unfamiliar with PA education, and a program operating with little institutional engagement because it has always solved its own problems.

What should a PA program agree on with a consultant before starting?
Scope and fee structure first, then deliverables with dates, named accountability, an understanding that the work is iterative, a communication cadence, agreement that problems get raised early, tolerance for honest bad news, and a shared view that the engagement should change how the program operates rather than only produce a submission.

Succession planning and faculty workload are the two leadership questions programs most often bring to a first conversation. Both have their own guides: Succession Planning Under the ARC-PA Sixth Edition and Faculty Workload in PA Education.