FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The Council on Rehabilitation Education looks closely at how well an academic program is educating its students, judging both by interviewing students and graduates and by talking with employers who have hired those graduates. At the University of Arkansas, the accrediting team liked what it saw.

The UA master’s program in rehabilitation counselor education recently earned accreditation through academic year 2013-2014. The accrediting team placed no conditions on the accreditation, and the team leader described the program as exemplary.

The accreditation represents the latest in a string of achievements for the program. U.S. News and World Report ranked it as No. 15 in the nation among university programs in 2003, the last time the magazine announced rankings in the category, and last year the program received the No. 1 ranking in scholarly publications in the field of rehabilitation. Richard T. Roessler, University Professor of rehabilitation education and research, won two notable national awards in 2004, the Distinguished Career Award in Rehabilitation Education from the National Council on Rehabilitation Education and the James F. Garrett Award for a Distinguished Career in Rehabilitation from the American Rehabilitation Counseling Association.

Brent T. Williams, UA assistant professor of rehabilitation education and program coordinator, led the program through the accrediting process in preparation for the team’s visit last March. Long before the interviews and inspection took place, Williams began collecting and creating 1,587 pages of documents covering all aspects of the program in addition to completing a self-study of the program and conducting a survey of graduates from the past two years. The accrediting body required an 80 percent return rate on the survey and, with the help of a graduate student, Williams reached 87 percent of the graduates.

Williams and Roessler explained that the council accredits programs based on 127 standards, including curriculum content, teaching techniques, adequacy and supervision of internship and practicum sites, adequacy of resources and student assessments. The team interviewed all master’s students in the program during the two-day visit as well as interviewing the faculty in the rehabilitation counseling program and in the counselor education program. The two programs housed in the College of Education and Health Professions work in collaboration.

Service providers and employers including the Elizabeth Richardson Center, Sources for Community Independent Living, Quality Life Associates and Arkansas Rehabilitation Service, all in Northwest Arkansas, and rehabilitation service agencies in Missouri and Texas — reached by conference call — answered questions from the accrediting team.

“CORE (the Council on Rehabilitation Education) wants to know from employers who hire our graduates whether the graduates are prepared and well-trained for their jobs,” Williams said. “They also want to know if we listen to the students and the internship supervisors about changes we should incorporate into the curriculum to keep it up to date. They don’t want our program to be static. In the world of service providers, laws change, the environment changes, needs change. The whole point is to make sure we stay in touch with the outside world.”

Rehabilitation counselors must be certified by the National Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification to work in the field, and they must have a degree from a CORE-accredited program to receive that certificate. Most graduates of the program work as vocational counselors with people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, Roessler said.

“The clients may be people re-entering the world of work or going to work for the first time,” he said. “They may be people in the midst of a career who become disabled or experience a chronic illness and want to return to work or they may be young people in high school bridging to the world of work or post-secondary education.

“Some graduates take independent living roles where they assist people with disabilities to address all types of personal life-care needs so that they have control of their lives to the maximum amount possible. In the process, they may build their vocational capacity,” Roessler said.

Program graduates work for nonprofit agencies, national organizations, the private sector and state agencies as well as in academic settings. Graduates from the program, for instance, serve as directors of centers for disabled students at both John Brown University in Siloam Springs and at the University of Central Arkansas at Conway.

Bill Bowen works as chief operations officer for the Elizabeth Richardson Center, a nonprofit organization serving people with disabilities in Washington, Benton and Madison counties. The center considers the UA rehabilitation counseling program a partner in its mission of helping people with disabilities reach their highest level of independence within their communities.

As an internship site, the center offers students in the program the chance to apply what they learn in the classroom to a real world setting. It serves more than 400 people each year in facilities that include an early intervention program for children from birth to age 3, a preschool for children with developmental delays, life skill and job training for adults and residential facilities.

“We are a program that has been around for 40-plus years in a world where services for people with disabilities change dramatically,” Bowen said. “We’re looking for dynamic professionals to help us take care of our clients in the best possible manner. Students in the rehab counseling program bring current knowledge that we use to apply best practices.

“We are able to give the faculty feedback about our needs, and we have hired some great people from the UA program.”

The summary in the notification of accreditation noted these aspects as well.

“The major strength of this program rests in the faculty,” the accrediting body’s report said. “Faculty are current in their field, active with community service and engaged in scholarly activity. They have created a culture that respects diversity and provides a collegial, collaborative approach to learning. The faculty have extended the collaborative attitude to the field, reaching out to employers and supervisors in a way that has gained them high regard from practitioners and employers in the field.”

The summary also referred to state-of-the-art facilities and technological resources that offer unusual opportunities for students to learn.

More good outcomes for the program are expected with the addition of Lynn Koch to the faculty. Koch received her doctoral degree in rehabilitation psychology from the University of Wisconsin and taught in the rehabilitation counseling program at Kent State University prior to her appointment as program coordinator of the UA rehabilitation program, beginning this fall.