Engagement & Service

Criterion 5

As called for by its mission, the organization identifies its constituencies and serves them in ways both value.

Criterion Five focuses on service.  It looks at the extent and ways in which the institution engages with and serves the community.  The Commission states that “If colleges and universities have erred in the past half century, it has been in marginalizing the importance of their engagement in ‘serving the common good.’”  The first Criterion repeats the call for the institution to be explicit about how it defines its constituencies and the service it intends to provide to them.  Criterion Five asks for evidence that the organization lives up to its mission.