Accreditation encourages excellence and in-depth, continual assessment and improvement. We now see maintaining our accreditation as not only good for our program, but good for the field of environmental education as a whole!

An essential benefit of NAAEE’s accreditation of our program has been to assess and improve the TREE Semester. We have improved our program based on accreditation evaluator feedback and, perhaps even more importantly, the process of preparing the certification and re-certification applications.

Being accredited helps us feel part of the broader environmental education community. That is important in a field served by a relatively small number of undergraduate and graduate programs. We know we are stronger together and hope other institutions will choose to pursue accreditation for their environmental education programs, too!

Our decision to pursue NAAEE accreditation emerged from our program development process. From the beginning, we recognized the value of grounding our curriculum in established professional standards. Earning NAAEE accreditation has provided many benefits that have strengthened both our program and our graduates' professional opportunities.

Accreditation has helped our program to be favorably viewed by university staff and administrators who might be less familiar with the professional discipline of environmental education by ensuring that the program is high quality and adheres to standards of practice in the field.