<p>From my experience with accreditation with one type of professional school, public administration (and NASPAA), accrediting bodies look for a variety of things including breadth and coverage of the program, autonomy of the program (budget and administrative delegation), and size of the program (a certain minimum number of FTE's--full-time equivalent faculty). (Lots of programs offer unaccredited MPA degrees, some that are credible on their own, and this doesn't by itself seem to affect hirability of the grads.)</p>
<p>If similar standards obtain for FIDER (and no doubt several more expectations as well), from what Cama now says and from what I read in that article, it's unlikely that Parsons will seek or be able to obtain FIDER accreditation if it folds its interior design program into architecture. It may still have an very good program for students, perhaps a better one than before, but to the extent that the program management is not "autonomous" or doesn't have a sufficient number of FTE faculty (and perhaps never did), it simply may not qualify for accreditation. Again, this is speculative.</p>
<p>In the case of RISD, I can imagine something similar. Just like furniture design broke out of industrial design, I believe the program in "interior architecture" broke out of architecture. Unlike Parsons, which is folding interior design back into architecture, RISD doesn't appear to be doing that (as far as I know). So, however good the program may be (I don't know), it possibly can't qualify for accreditation because of small size or other factors. It now has just 5 full-time faculty (plus a number of part time), only two of whom are tenured. Perhaps that's not a large or stable enough base on which to operate or to seek accreditation. In contrast, to take another example, the industrial design program at RISD (one of its largest and strongest, of course), has 11 full-time faculty. But there also some other small but well regarded programs at RISD such as glass and jewelry.</p>
<p>Perhaps RISDprof will reappear here and clarify some of these issues.</p>