The APA Commission on Accreditation (CoA) is recognized by the United States Department of Education (ED) and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). The APA’s scope of recognition includes the accreditation in the United States of doctoral programs in health service psychology (i.e., clinical, counseling, and school psychology, combinations of two or more of these practice areas and other developed practice areas in health service psychology); doctoral internship programs in health service psychology; postdoctoral residency programs in health service psychology; and preaccreditation of doctoral internship programs in health service psychology and postdoctoral residency programs in health service psychology. As such the CoA’s Standards must align with the recognition criteria of both the ED and the CHEA.

In order to comply with criteria established by external bodies that recognize accrediting agencies, the CoA requires programs keep all materials pertaining to any complaints/grievances filed against it to comply with CoA, institutional, state, and federal policies, whichever time-period is longest. To meet this requirement, the APA-CoA has clarified its related policies resulting in modifications to Implementing Regulations (IR) C-6 D, C-7 I, and C-7 P.

In accordance with the APA “Policies for Accreditation Governance” and the US Department of Education regulations for notice and comment, the CoA is providing additional information and making the changes available for a 30-day period of public notice at http://apps.apa.org/accredcomment.

Please contact the office with questions at APAaccred@apa.org or by calling (202) 336-5979.