UNYP International Relations program re-accreditation: the beginning of a new era

June 18 2019

The 2018-2019 academic year has been a very important landmark for UNYP. In 2016, new standards for accreditation in tertiary education were approved in the Czech Republic. As a result, all universities operating in the Czech Republic were obligated to re-accredit their programs under the new norms.

Over the previous two years, the university administration has worked hard to make all of the necessary changes to comply with the revised standards. This has obviously been a very demanding period for our academics and administrators, but at the same time it has been an opportunity to showcase our institution’s commitment to quality education. The accreditation process requires innumerable documents and tedious administrative work, but also offers the opportunity to make positive changes to the programs that we offer. And this is how we approached the re-accreditation process: as a chance to introduce improvements that will lead the university into the next decade.

This was particularly true for the School of International Relations. We saw the re-accreditation as a golden opportunity for our school to make those transformations needed to keep us relevant as an institution of reference in the Czech Republic. The re-accreditation brought with it a change of focus, and we have modernized our accredited International Relations curriculum to include new courses on the theory and practice of international relations and international law. The course also now provides more space for electives that students can use to personalize and define their profile. A second positive change has been the incorporation of more full-time instructors to contribute to the academic production of the school. All of these changes have been made in cooperation with our partner State University of New York-Empire State College, maintaining the dual degree character of the program. We are very proud of having achieved all this, and of our efforts having been rewarded with re-accreditation.

All these changes are heralding a new era for the School of International Relations and our degree program. The new curriculum has already attracted the attention of a large number of well-qualified candidates, and we are very excited about the new academic year.