Bay Atlantic University (BAU) Recovers Its Accreditation

By David North on April 22, 2019

Washington, D.C.'s Bay Atlantic University (the Turkish-owned institution once known as BAU University) has had its accreditation restored by the also D.C.-based Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS).

We wrote previously on ACICS' decision-making on this small school, with nice digs just around the corner from the White House. Bay Atlantic has now supplied ACICS with the audited financial statements it had been seeking for many months as well as new information on the school's placement rate. The university has one remaining task, as far as ACICS is concerned: the provision of some documentation on some faculty members, which seems to be a largely clerical chore.

One of the reasons we dealt with this school's accreditation challenges was as a means of reporting on the nuances of ACICS processes for all of the schools it covers; not only does the agency grant and deny and revoke accreditation, it also issues show cause directives (serious warnings) and compliance warnings (less serious) to its members. In this case, the good news came to BAU wrapped in this strained terminology: "[T]he Council acted to vacate the continued financial show-cause and the student achievement show-cause directives."

A school can get the Department of Homeland Security's permission to cause the issuance of F-1 foreign student visas without being accredited, but it cannot do so without a state (or D.C., in this case) license.