The Accreditation Council met in Berlin on 12/13 March 2026 for its 128th meeting, which was the first meeting in the 2026 to 2029 term of office.
The regular elections for Chairperson and Deputy Chairperson took place at the meeting. Both Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans-Joachim Bargstädt as Chairperson and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bartosch as Deputy Chairperson were confirmed in their offices.
“I would like to thank the members of the panel for their renewed trust. The next four years offer us the opportunity to provide fresh impetus together with our new colleagues and, as the Accreditation Council, to once again responsibly accompany the strategic quality development of higher education institutions with an open mind,” says Prof. Bargstädt (you can find Prof. Bargstädt’s CV here).
Prof. Bartosch also thanks the members for his re-election. “Thanks to a good combination of experienced members and new faces who bring further perspectives and backgrounds to our work, I am looking forward to the coming years,” he explains (you can find Prof. Bartosch’s CV here).
At its meeting, the Accreditation Council accredited the Alternative Procedures at the Technical University of Nuremberg, a higher education institution that is still in its foundation phase. The Alternative Procedures combine the parallel development of the quality management systems with a cumulative and iterative system assessment that incorporates internal and external expertise. The concept is supplemented by the program-related approach of the rolling audit, which enables a comprehensive view of all study programmes and at the same time focuses on the special didactic profile and interdisciplinary orientation of the study programmes.
A further 202 applications were submitted to the Accreditation Council, eleven of which concerned system accreditations. The Accreditation Council granted six higher education institutions the authority to accredit their study programmes independently for eight years on the basis of the initial accreditation or reaccreditation of their internal quality assurance system. In four applications for system accreditation, it confirmed that the higher education institutions had successfully implemented improvement measures as part of fulfilling the conditions; one application was rejected.
The 191 programme accreditation applications comprised 519 study programmes. Two applications were postponed and one study programme was rejected. The Accreditation Council certified a good quality standard for all others.
In addition, the Accreditation Council has set up a working group to develop regulations for the evaluation of Alternative Procedures.
The Accreditation Council is the central decision-making body of the German Accreditation Council (formerly the Foundation for the Accreditation of Study Programmes in Germany). The Foundation, based in Bonn, was established by the 16 Federal States and tasked with organizing the German accreditation system. Since the state treaty came into force on 01.01.2018, its main task has been to make decisions on program and system accreditations as well as Alternative Procedures.
Further information:
German Accreditation Council
Sara Kammler, Head of Committee Support/Public Relations
Adenauerallee 73, 53113 Bonn
Tel: (0228) 338306-0, Fax: (0228) 338306-79
kammler@akkreditierungsrat.de
www.akkreditierungsrat.de