State Licensure for Higher Education
State licensure is the first step (or steps) that any new institution must navigate before operating as a higher education entity in the United States.
We help institutions obtain approvals for their current and planned activities to comply with state regulatory requirements.
How We Help with State Licensure
Depending on the scope of your planned activities, you may be subject to a single home-state institutional licensure or a programmatic (state board) approval. If you’re serving students who reside in multiple states, you might be subject to the requirements of every state where students are enrolled. And, yes, this is still true for online institutions. We can help you navigate how your institution's current and planned activities fit into the state regulatory landscape.
We begin with an analysis of applicable licensure requirements (both institutional and subject-specific), customized for your current and planned instructional activities. For online institutions, this includes a comprehensive regulatory environment report for all 50 states and territories, which identifies applicable licensure, approval, or exemption requirements and an executive summary of enrollment, marketing, and hiring opportunities across the nation. For states where statutory exemptions exist, this report also includes applicable statutes and summary information that can be provided as evidence of compliance to accrediting agencies or other regulatory bodies.
We work with you to identify priorities and develop application materials to meet your goals. Throughout our engagement, we maintain project tools to provide administrator (detailed) and leadership (executive dashboard) level visibility on the state licensure progress. These tools allow us to collaborate with your team to develop and review materials, answer questions, and track needs as each license/approval project progresses.
Over time, the documentation developed becomes a powerful knowledge base from which additional licenses can be more efficiently completed, and often becomes the foundation for narratives and exhibits if the institution chooses to seek accreditation.
