Two Organizations, One Educational Mission
The Accreditation Board for Offsite Construction Education was co-founded by the Center for Offsite Construction and the Modular Building Institute to address a shared challenge: the offsite construction industry is growing faster than the educational infrastructure needed to support it.
The MBI-CfOC industry-wide Task Force (2025) concluded that offsite construction is maturing into a distinct field with its own methods, workflows, delivery paradigms, and workforce requirements. That conclusion led to a clear institutional next step: create an accrediting body capable of helping colleges and universities build rigorous degree programs for this emerging field.
ABOCE carries that work forward as a dedicated accreditation organization.
The Center for Offsite Construction (CfOC)
The Center for Offsite Construction, housed at New York Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture and Design, has led the academic and research foundation for this effort. The Center’s work focuses on the transition from traditional project-based construction toward more repeatable, product-oriented, manufacturing-informed delivery models.
CfOC initiated a draft Master of Science in Offsite Design and Delivery, convened Senior Research Fellows from across the offsite construction sector, and developed early curricular frameworks that helped inform the Task Force’s discussion. Its role in ABOCE’s founding reflects a commitment to building the academic infrastructure required for offsite construction to mature as a recognized educational and professional domain.
The Modular Building Institute (MBI)
Founded in 1983, the Modular Building Institute (MBI) is the international non-profit trade association serving commercial modular construction. MBI brings deep industry knowledge, practitioner networks, workforce-development experience, and a broad understanding of the skills employers need from future graduates.
Within the Task Force process, MBI contributed industry leadership and educational strategy, including work already underway to develop online courses and professional-development pathways. MBI’s participation helped ensure that ABOCE’s founding direction remained connected to the needs of manufacturers, builders, developers, contractors, and other organizations working directly in offsite construction.
From Task Force to Accrediting Board
In 2025, MBI and CfOC convened an exploratory industry-wide task force to test the feasibility of a new degree accreditation framework for offsite construction. The Task Force included representatives from academia, education administration, modular manufacturing, design practice, construction, and industry leadership.
The task force did not begin with fixed answers. Its work was iterative, distributed, and consensus-oriented. Members reviewed the need for a new accreditation track, considered draft criteria and procedures, studied governance and legal structure, assessed market demand, and examined financial models for launching a sustainable accrediting body.
At the conclusion of the process, the task force voted unanimously to recommend that MBI and NY Tech advance the formation of a North American offsite construction degree accrediting body.
An Independent Public-Purpose Organization
ABOCE is being organized to serve the field as an independent, mission-driven accrediting body. While it was co-founded through the leadership of CfOC and MBI, its purpose is broader than either founding organization.
The Task Force recommended that the accrediting body be structured as a nonprofit organization dedicated to educational quality, public benefit, transparency, balanced representation, and conflict-of-interest safeguards. This structure is essential to the credibility of accreditation. Schools, students, employers, and the public must be able to trust that accreditation decisions are made through fair, transparent, and defensible procedures.
A Shared Commitment to the Future of Construction Education
CfOC and MBI came together around a shared premise: offsite construction cannot scale without a workforce educated for its realities.
That workforce will need to understand manufacturing-informed design, systems integration, productization, digital coordination, transportation, site assembly, quality control, procurement, and the relationship between factory and field. ABOCE exists to help academic institutions organize those competencies into credible degree pathways.
Through ABOCE, the founding organizations are helping create the educational infrastructure needed for a more coordinated, productive, and scalable construction industry.