The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is a global membership organization headquartered in

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

, United States. It works to improve quality and equity in

undergraduate education Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and before postgraduate education, usually in a college or university. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree. For example, ...

and advance

liberal education A liberal education is a system or course of education suitable for the cultivation of a free () human being. It is based on the medieval concept of the liberal arts or, more commonly now, the liberalism of the Age of Enlightenment. It has been d ...

. Founded in 1915 as the Association of American Colleges, AAC&U comprises more than 1,000 member institutions in the US and abroad, including accredited public and private colleges,

community college A community college is a type of undergraduate higher education institution, generally leading to an associate degree, certificate, or diploma. The term can have different meanings in different countries: many community colleges have an open enr ...

s, research universities, and comprehensive universities. It was renamed the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 1995, and acquired its current name in 2022.

History

The organization was founded in

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

in 1915. In 1976, it ended its role in federal lobbying and spun-off this work to the newly created

National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) located in Washington D.C. It is an organization of private American colleges and universities. Founded in 1976, it is made up of over 1,000 indepe ...

. Today, it focuses on "advancing the vitality and democratic purposes of undergraduate liberal education" and hosts conferences, workshops and an annual meeting.

Publications

AAC&U publishes ''Liberal Education'' magazine, sponsors meetings and institutes for

campus A campus traditionally refers to the land and buildings of a college or university. This will often include libraries, lecture halls, student centers and, for residential universities, residence halls and dining halls. By extension, a corp ...

teams and publishes reports and

monographs A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...

. ''Peer Review'' was a quarterly

magazine A magazine is a periodical literature, periodical publication, print or digital, produced on a regular schedule, that contains any of a variety of subject-oriented textual and visual content (media), content forms. Magazines are generally fin ...

published by the association from 2000 to fall 2019 that reported "emerging trends and key debates in undergraduate liberal education".

The Multi-State Collaborative to Advance Quality Student Learning

The Multi-State Collaborative to Advance Quality Student Learning was a collaboration led by the AAC&U and the state higher education executive officers from approximately 2014 to 2018. As of October 2016, the project involved 900 faculty members at 80 public two- and four-year institutions in 13 states. The project aimed to produce a cross-institutional method of evaluating student learning by getting faculty from different institutions to agree on a set of general education outcomes by using a common rubric, the AAC&U Value Rubrics, for evaluating student work. The leaders of the collaboration hoped that the results of the project would "paint an accurate picture of learning nationwide and, in turn, spark continuing improvement. The notability of the project is its "subject of analysis: the authentic stuff of college – the homework, problem sets, and papers that students regularly produce."

References

{{Authority control College and university associations and consortia in the United States 1915 establishments in the United States Organizations established in 1915 Member organizations of the American Council of Learned Societies