ACCREDITATION OF FISHERIES AND WILDLIFE PROGRAMS

Program accreditation has been debated for many years by fisheries and wildlife professionals as a way of improving educational quality, con ferring professional recognition, facilitating employment decisions re garding hiring and promotion, and providing numerous other possible be nefits. We discuss the potential benefits and disadvantages of program accreditation and give examples of current accreditation or similar s ystems for professional evaluation and recognition. We believe the pot ential benefits of an accreditation program would not be sufficient to counteract its many significant disadvantages, and such a program wou ld be redundant with the current certification programs of the America n Fisheries Society (AFS) and The Wildlife Society (TWS) and other pro gram review methods. Because of the difficulty of reaching agreement w ithin the fisheries and wildlife professions and the resistance of col leges and universities to accept new accreditation programs, we believ e there is little likelihood of accreditation of fisheries or wildlife programs being implemented in the foreseeable future.