An accreditation agency is apparently readying their own review at the University of North Carolina (UNC) - Chapel Hill in light of the "paper class" scandal.

According to the Raleigh News and Observer, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' Commission on Colleges (SACS) will issue a letter to UNC officially notifying them of the probe. The review is in direct response to the report published by Kenneth Wainstein, a former Justice Department official hired by UNC to investigate the supposed paper classes.

Wainstein found that more than 3,100 students had taken courses in the school's then-named African and Afro-American Studies department that rarely met, if at all. All that was required for the courses was one written paper and participants were rewarded with a high mark. This went on for nearly two decades, Wainstein learned.

"It is huge," Belle Wheelan, the SACS' president, told the Observer. "It's bigger than anything with which we've dealt before... I just don't know in what direction the board is going to go."

The accreditation agency's review is expected to take months to complete and even then, they do not expect to return a decision until next June.

Wainstein found that about half the students who took these paper classes were student-athletes, though coaches did not know the extent of what these courses were. Instead, the investigator found it was academic advisers who were responsible for ushering students to the paper classes.

According to a report from the Associated Press late last month, Wainstein said ignorance and neglect from administrators at UNC allowed this academic scandal to go on for as long as it did. Carroll Folt, UNC chancellor, echoed Wainstein's sentiment in a statement at the time.

If a school loses accreditation, it loses federal funding, which is typically a fast track to closure. Folt has expressed that she does not think UNC will have its accreditation suspended, as she has led the school in a proactive approach to handling the fallout of the Wainstein report.

"They've been very appreciative," Folt told the Observer of the SACS commission. "They say that we have been doing everything one should do, of course, to work with your accrediting agency. So I feel very confident that we can really work with them in a productive way."

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