The College’s Adult Fitness and Exercise Science Program has achieved the academic equivalent of a gold medal.
In what Human Performance and Sport Professor Joe Quatrochi calls “a major accomplishment,” the program recently won accreditation by the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs. CAAHEP is the largest programmatic accrediting agency in the health sciences field. It reviews and accredits more than 2,000 educational programs in 23 health science occupations, according to its website.
Accreditation will help pave the way for graduates seeking jobs or planning on an advanced degree, says Quatrochi, who also directs the Adult Fitness and Exercise Science program, which prepares graduates for careers in areas such as worksite wellness, cardiac rehabilitation, strength conditioning and elder fitness.
Of the hundreds of exercise science programs in the country, only about 28 have achieved CAAHEP accreditation, and Metro State’s program is the only one the Rocky Mountain region to achieve this distinction, according to Quatrochi.
To qualify, the exercise science program had to demonstrate compliance with about 190 standards set by the American College of Sports Medicine, which calls itself the largest sports medicine and exercise science organization in the world, with more than 20,000 members working in medical specialties, allied health professions and scientific disciplines.
The ACSM “pretty much puts out the guidelines for the entire country for exercise testing, exercise prescription,” Quatrochi says. “Those guidelines are embedded in our academic program and we had to demonstrate that in order to pursue accreditation.”
For Metro State students, graduating from a CAAHEP-accredited program can open doors.
“It means that any prospective employer or graduate school would be able to rely on the fact that we have been endorsed and accredited by the accrediting body of ACSM, and that our students will have gone through a program that demonstrated all of those competencies for undergraduate-prepared exercise science students,” Quatrochi says.
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