American Academy for Liberal Education

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The American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) is a United States educational accreditation organization that provides two types of accreditation for higher education institutions that offer general education programs in the liberal arts. It provides institutional accreditation for universities and colleges that want AALE to be their sole accreditor and it provides program accreditation for liberal arts programs within higher education institutions that are institutionally accredited by another accreditor.^[1] AALE was formed in 1992.^[2]

AALE accreditation of institutions of higher education is recognized by the United States Department of Education Office of Postsecondary Education[1]. As such, this accreditation enables institutions to participate in programs authorized under the Higher Education Act and other U.S. federal programs.

The American Academy for Liberal Education is also an accreditor of K-12 charter schools nationwide.

As of December 2006, the academy was the accreditor for eight U.S. institutions, including several colleges with a "great books" approach, and several programs outside the country.^[2]

On December 6, 2006, the U.S. Department of Education's National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which oversees higher education accreditation organizations, recommended barring the AALE from accrediting new institutions or programs for at least six months. The move followed a determination that the organization had been lax in not setting minimum standards for what students must learn at the colleges it accredits. As an additional punishment, the committee decided to postpone consideration of the academy's re-recognition for six months.^[2] In April 2007 Education Secretary Margaret Spellings upheld the advisory committee's action, stating in a letter that the AALE had "been cited consistently" for not having clear standards for measuring student achievement and not collecting and reviewing data to help judge achievement.^[3] Earlier, advocates of quality control in U.S. higher education had publicly expressed concerns about the AALE's June 2005 decision to issue programmatic accreditation to the Tbilisi Campus College of the American University for Humanities, which appeared to be connected to the operator of the American University of Hawaii, an unaccredited institution that was closed by court order in January 2005 after the court found that it had issued degrees illegally.^[4]