Immigration and Customs Enforcement has announced that its Student and Exchange Visitor Program will no longer allow ACICS schools 18 months to find new accreditors.
Reversing its earlier position, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) has announced that schools accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS) will not have 18-months to obtain accreditation from another accreditor recognized by the US Department of Education to maintain SEVP certification. The action will immediately impact English-language programs, which must cease enrolling new F-1 students and will lose SEVP approval if institutions offering such programs are not able to demonstrate they have accreditation from a Department of Education-recognized accreditor by April 24, 2017. For all other programs, affected schools must either secure alternative accreditation or demonstrate that credits from each certified program are fully accepted by three other institutions that are accredited by a federally-recognized accrediting agency by that date.
When the Department of Education first announced in December 2016 that it would no longer recognize ACICS as an accrediting agency, SEVP issued a statement that it would “follow the Department of Education’s timeline for schools and students affected by ACICS’s loss of recognition as an accreditor.” SEVP went on to expressly state that “schools accredited by ACICS have 18 months to find a different accreditor for their programs.”