Edward Waters College, which lost and then regained its accreditation after a run-in with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, has now won the restoration of full accreditation and the lifting of a warning that the accreditor had placed on it. According to News4Jax.com, a Web site run by WJXT, a local television station in Jacksonville, Fla., the Southern Association, known as SACS, opted on Thursday to accredit the college through 2014, and Edward Waters announced the news today.

The college lost its accreditation in 2004, after a local newspaper revealed that it had plagiarized large parts of its Quality Enhancement Plan from a similar document produced for SACS by Alabama A&M University (The Chronicle, December 9, 2004). Without accreditation, a college is ineligible to receive federal student aid, so the Southern Association’s action threatened the existence of Edward Waters, which relies heavily on tuition for revenue. More than 90 percent of its students receive financial aid.

After an appeal to the accreditor failed, Edward Waters took a different approach: It sued the accreditor, saying it had failed to follow correct procedures (The Chronicle, March 2, 2005). The college also rallied support from a bevy of powerful leaders, including Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida.

Three months later, SACS agreed to restore the college’s accreditation in return for the dismissal of Edward Waters’s lawsuit (The Chronicle, June 24, 2005). A year later, the college appears to be back in the accreditor’s good graces, but at least some of the problems that produced last year’s crisis may still be present, to judge from an audit released last year (The Chronicle, September 2, 2005).