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Sept. 24, 2007
Altering Accreditation — But How?
In the year since Education Secretary Margaret Spellings formally embraced the work of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education and began her efforts to carry out its work, no topic has been more at the forefront than the system of regional and national accreditation that higher education, the government and states use to ensure the quality of American colleges and universities.
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Although the topic was far from front and center in the commission’s report, the Education Department has put changes in accreditation at the fulcrum of its campaign to force higher education institutions to be more accountable to the public. The department has turned up the heat on accrediting agencies in the department’s process for recognizing and approving accreditors, and unsuccessfully sought new federal rules aimed at forcing the agencies to collect and report significantly expanded information on how well colleges they oversee educate students, the latter effort largely stymied by Congress to date.
Anyone who has been perplexed about the Bush administration’s reasons for using accreditation as a tool to achieve its larger goals in higher education may have found some answers Friday at a session sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington. The half-day event, “Higher Education Accreditation: Evaluating the System and Possible Alternatives,” was not exactly an even-handed review of the accreditation system: The nine participants were heavily tilted toward critics who have spoken or written of accreditation’s flaws, with a lone speaker, Judith S. Eaton of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, who could be seen as representing the views of accreditors, though she herself is not one.
Four of the speakers were closely tied to the Spellings Commission, including its chairman, Charles Miller, who, freed from whatever constraints he felt while leading the federal panel, made clear a disdain for accreditation that had been muted in the panel’s final report. Miller, who has continued to consult regularly with department officials since the commission formally shut down, gave a keynote address in which he described accrediting agencies as self-regulatory bodies that are “fundamentally and inherently biased” toward the colleges they supposedly judge, operate in secret, and “lack true oversight or public accountability.” The accreditation system holds colleges to outmoded definitions of quality that discourage experimentation by traditional institutions and make it difficult for colleges with new instructional or business models to develop.
“Accredition is the primary barrier to innovation in American higher education,” Miller said. “Accreditation is the biggest barrier to real competition. Accreditation is the biggest barrier to real change.”
Arthur J. Rothkopf, another Spellings Commission alumnus who was president of Lafayette College and is now a vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was one of several panelists who characterized the system of regional accreditation as a way for traditional colleges and universities to shield themselves from making necessary changes. College leaders have fought federal and other efforts to require accrediting agencies to make their reports on individual colleges public, and he accused higher education associations and campus presidents of “trying to run out the clock,” resisting change to limit what the Bush administration can accomplish in the 15 months it has left in office.
“Guess what, that’s not going to happen,” said Rothkopf, who noted that his views on accreditation were “evolving,” and presumably not in a positive direction. “People are concerned about quality and accountability,” and “the academy has to understand” that that concern will remain even after Spellings and Bush are gone. “I urge my colleagues in higher education and at education associations to try to be more open to change, not to be so wedded to the status quo,” he added.
Sara Martinez Tucker, who was also a member of the Spellings Commission before becoming U.S. under secretary of education, said she and other department officials were deeply disappointed that the agency’s efforts to pressure accreditors to hold colleges more accountable for student learning had been portrayed as an effort at “federalizing higher education.” “We have no interest,” she said, in increasing the federal government’s role in dictating standards for accreditors or, in turn, for colleges, because “we recognize the uniqueness” of different kinds of institutions.
Eaton of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, who went head-to-head with Education Department officials on the department’s negotiated rule making committee for accreditation, challenged Tucker’s characterization, saying she believed that the department very much has tried to impose its own standards for judging quality instead of letting the accreditors and colleges define that together. “We need the federal government to understand the difference between holding higher education accountable for quality versus deciding on its own what quality is,” Eaton said. The former is appropriate, the latter is not, she asserted.
But while she was thrust into the role as the lone defender of higher education and accreditation at the AEI’s stacked session, Eaton conceded nonetheless that significant change was necessary from within.
“Higher education itself needs to be realistic,” Eaton said. “There is a low level of trust in social institutions ... and there are continuing demands for greatly enhanced accountability and transparency. Higher education is going to remain essential and it’s likely to remain expensive, and that’s going to continue to drive consumer-like behavior and scrutiny about our enterprise. Accreditors need to continue to work on accountability ... and we need it sooner rather than later.”
The assault on accreditation and higher education continued during the session’s second panel, which focused on potential alternatives to the traditional methods of accreditation. Anne D. Neal, whose as American Council of Trustees and Alumni has blasted the accreditation system in several reports and who now sits on the Education Department’s accreditation advisory panel, called for ending the link between accreditation and federal financial aid that gives the accreditors’ stamp of approval so much significance.
Jeff Sandefer, an investor who has helped to found an independent M.B.A. program in entrepreneurship, predicted that the “monopoly of regional accreditation is sure to crumble like the Berlin Wall” as college spending and prices continue to rise and students realize that they can get a higher quality and more cost-effective education at institutions that operate outside the traditional higher education structure.
And Miller, the former Spellings Commission chairman, called for an alternative to accreditation in which investors or others interested in creating new forms of higher education would gain the ability to operate (and award federal financial aid) “prospectively,” rather than having to wait years to gain an accreditor’s imprimatur, which many for-profit and other providers of new higher education institutions argue often comes too late to allow them to succeed.
Eaton said she welcomed the idea of new kinds of accrediting agencies. “Let’s compete,” she said.
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Comments
cost-effective?
From what I’ve seen from most for-profit education, to wit, the concern about making money at the expense of educating students,the bottom line as a kind of deity, the lies and omission made to induce students to enroll, I think that Mr. Sandefer is being fanciful if he thinks that “students [will] realize that they can get a higher quality and more cost-effective education at institutions that operate outside the traditional higher education structure.”
Cost-effective so far as been “on the cheap” and higher quality so far has been only in the illusions that admission “counselors” conjure for the benefit of the marks or students.
Alphonso Quashie, Legal, at 8:20 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Agenda
Accreditation reform is the next step in the agenda to privatize higher education. Organizations such as the WTO, OECD, IMF, and World Bank are eager to reap profits of an international and privatized system of higher education. This tactic has destroyed our heathcare system in the US, and higher education is the next target. Accreditation is a way of controlling outcomes, proving that the system is “broken", and mandating reforms. Until this trend is reversed, we’ll see increasing managerialism and less freedom for scholars to pursue truth wherever it may lead them.
David Ayers, at 8:25 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Remember That Formula, Yes?
I trust that Inside Higher Ed will continue to inform us untendentiously whenever panels or symposia are “not exactly an even-handed review” or are “heavily tilted.” I also trust that my deed to the Brooklyn Bridge is legally valid.
Alan Charles Kors, Professor of History at University of Pennsylvania, at 8:35 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Alternatives?
It is premature to discuss what will eventually replace the guild form of self-regulation that we now have, without first considering the sources of core resistance to such changes.
Obviously (that is, to everyone but those in Ivory Towers) something as parochial and hamfisted as our medieval accrediting system is completely out of place today, given the need for greater transparency and greater accountability.
The important question is, why have all previous reform attempts been so easily brushed aside?
The two volume *Puffer Report* (July 1970) called for the creation of a national agency with ultimate authority over institutional accrediting. Actual accrediting was to continue to be performed by the regional commissions, but using uniform standards determined by the national organization rather than on a regional basis.
In fact, the two largest accreditors, NCA and SACS, were deemed much too large to be effective, and were to be split up into smaller components to better serve their constituencies (Puffer Vol. I : 276).
The Puffer Report opted for a new organizational form that would more closely resemble a “public utility commission with a responsibility for protecting the public [which] becomes less oriented toward the membership and more toward the public as a whole” (Puffer, Vol I : 261).
But the proposed national agency was never born.
Likewise, there is a long list of reforms, each of which has been beaten back: 1990s SPREs, and now Spellings’ proposed 34 CFR 602 changes.
For those serious about reforming HE accreditation, these kinds of setbacks must first be better understood.
The question is: where is this tremendous, even unprecedented, capacity to RESIST change is coming from?
As I struggle with this question, a branch of sociology and organizational theory called new institutionalism may hold the answer in terms of the EMBEDDEDNESS of institutions and organizations.
It is clear that, as federal aid to higher education skyrockets, the government has come to depend more and more upon the gatekeeping function of the accrediting agencies, swelling them with legitimacy that far exceeds that of their former bounds.
Even more relevant are the overwhelming numbers of ties between accreditors and their member institutions, as well as numerous philanthropists and alumni. The institutional environment is just saturated with these kinds of mutually dependent bonds, binding them to one another.
Organizational embeddedness on this scale makes it all but impossible to reform one *without* also reforming the other.
Any attempts at reform, therefore, immediately implicates the feds, state agencies, the institutions themselves and their stakeholders, and all the political and economic ties binding them all together in a government-education complex. This is why change does not occur: they are all tied together, one cannot move without the others also moving; they are lockstep.
Far from being the cause of a lack of innovation and experimentation among institutions, accreditation is itself the *result* of this kind of structural inertia, impervious to change (for example, the “Atomic Bomb” problem of delisting a major accreditor). Nor can reform originate from the institutional side.
Viewed from this structural perspective, guilds that are this encompassing will never be disbanded – unless the entire system begins to totter.
But, as history shows, it has always been the case that once guilds lose sight of their public service agendas, decline and the loss of power is inevitable.
Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 9:30 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Sounds like a bash-fest.
There is nothing wrong with institutions being unique. Unfortunately, there is nothing unique about institutions that rip off students, mostly in the private sector (both for-profit and supposedly non-profit).
When accreditors start focusing on the students and what students need, when their approval really does equal the mark of quality, and when they refuse to allow their institutions to deceive, then they will regain their credibility. Until then, they will face an uphill struggle against those who despise academia.
kgotthardt, at 9:30 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Three points:
(1) I just left the faculty at a top 50 liberal arts college who finished an extensive reaccreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. This process was not only extremely expensive in terms of faculty resource time and money, but the outcome was entirely predictable. Executive staff from each of our competitors were the ones doing the evaluating. Do we expect that any of them will question what we are doing with our students when we have just as much a say on their reaccreditation status? And you should see how these reviews are used to justify enormous expenditures in the name of educating students that have nothing to do with learning. By my estimate, our last reaccreditation with SACS cost us over $35 million in non-academic capital commitments.
(2) Knee jerk rejection of private competition in higher education is misguided. Student learning does not get sacrificed in the name of enrolling more students. If students are not being served well, then they will not enroll and private institutions will fail. The problem is that it is not very easy for a competitor to open up and attract students who are not being served. Does food quality suffer in the name of profit? What about safety and quality of housing? Or the millions of other goods and services that are served by greedy interests? To pick education as being “too important” or “different” is simply a straw man meant to stop a discussion dead in its tracks.
(3) I could probably start a brick and mortar college and deliver a very high quality education for roughly $15,000 in fully loaded costs if I do not offer all of the frills students typically are forced to buy at traditional colleges. I suspect that healthy competition and entrepreneurial professors and staff could drive this cost well down. However, I cannot get accredited under my current business model, largely because my competitors require me to offer many of the frills that drive up costs so prohibitively. No different than the cartelization of many other industries.
wintercow20, at 9:35 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Quite a Conspiracy Theory, Mr. Ayers
The WTO, IMF, etc are behind the Administration’s critique of current accreditation standards? Wow. I guess the New World Order already arrived and no one noticed.
Regardless of whether you buy into wacky conspiracy theories, the Department may have a real chance to muck around with the accreditation process if Congress passes a new HEA. The Senate-passed HEA bill makes a handful of modifications to the law dealing with accreditation, more than sufficient cause for the Department to try imposing its will on accreditors through negotiated rulemaking.
Scott, at 9:40 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Someone has an agenda. The horror! The horror!
Charles Alan Kors seems to think there’s something wrong with the fact that Inside Higher Ed has an agenda, and that its articles actually are written from—gasp—a perspective! If only everyone could be like Kors, dispassionately dedicated to Truth and able to view the world from the perspective of the One True God....
Eveningsun, at 9:55 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Practical path?
Love McGhee and wintercow20’s posts and it sound like that Eaton is agreeable in problems that facing the higher education.
Now. Do anyone know, if we really like to create new kinds of accrediting agencies, the process or the authority to do so?
Thanks.
Duncan, at 10:40 am EDT on September 24, 2007
No Conspiracy
Scott,
It is no conspiracy theory. It is no secret that international economic institutions have taken neoliberalism hook, line, and sinker. Financial “agreements” in Argentina, Mexico, and many other nations have resulted in de-funding of higher education. Even in the US we are seeing significant state reductions in higher education. If you read WTO documents about higher education, you will see that GATS explicitly promotes standardization (accreditation) and managerialism in higher education. The policies of the US and these organizations are dialectically related. But don’t take my word for it. Do some reading of primary documents and figure it our for yourself.
David Ayers, at 11:25 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Middle States vs. NY Board of Regents, et al
Comparing the current system of voluntary accreditation vs. governmental regulation might shed some light on the controversy. Is there anyone out there who would swap the NY Board of Regents approach for Middle States or any other state regulatory system? Could the federal government possibly do a better job than the states are currently doing? Critics of accreditation have been around since its inception, but none has been smart enough to come up with a better system—or at least one that is salable. Frankly, it doesn’t take too many smarts to criticize accreditation, but it takes a lot of smarts to come up with a better system. The current debate is likely to go down as just another controversial event in the history of voluntary accreditation. Any substantive change would have to invade the sanctity of the classroom: 1) a system for checking to determine whether the curriculum is being followed, and 2) is the professor following an institution wide grading policy. GOOD LUCK1
Higher Ed Diogenes
Higher Ed Diogenes, at 11:55 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Roots of managerialism?
“If you read WTO documents about higher education, you will see that GATS explicitly promotes standardization (accreditation) and managerialism in higher education. The policies of the US and these organizations are dialectically related.”
The business revolution of 1890s-1920s spawned many wanna-be’s: Progressism even applied its highly bureaucratic methods (budgets, standardization) to things like home economics (!), social welfare and education in general. It was supposed to inaugurate a new era of efficiency and prosperity, etc.
The fact that GATS promotes standardization (it is open to debate if the standards movement has anything to do with higher ed accreditation, after the NCA paradigm shift of 1934) and managerialism has more to do with the *continuing legacy* of the efficiency craze of the business revolution than anything else. I’m sorry, but I don’t see a historical dialectic at work here.
Glen McGhee, FHEAP, at 2:20 pm EDT on September 24, 2007
D & D
The statutory basis for accrediting lies with the Higher Education Act, as amended, mostly Part H (Program Integrity) of Title IV. We are already familiar with the negotiated rulemaking for regs (mostly 34 CFR 602) See Part II of FHEAP’s rulemaking testimony, under Legislative Intent of HEA Sec 496 and following, link below.
“Comparing the current system of voluntary accreditation vs. governmental regulation might shed some light on the controversy.”
Yes, but it is a mistake to characterize HE accreditation as “voluntary,” however true this was 100 years ago. From their very inception, these ‘special interest groups’ emerged like trade associations from the ranks of higher education, with elitist agendas to improve their status and stabilize the chaotic higher education environment of the late 1890s. They are no different from the AMA of 1850s in this regard.
“Is there anyone out there who would swap the NY Board of Regents approach for Middle States or any other state regulatory system? Could the federal government possibly do a better job than the states are currently doing?”
This question is worth a studied response. In 1960s the State of Florida formerly ran its own assessment program of institutions of higher education, alongside that of the Southern Association, to keep diploma mills out of that state. However, once SACS solidified its monopoly, this ended (sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I believe).
But a study from that period (McLendon, FSU 1968) that compared the separate forms of accreditation, found that 1/3 of the time they agreed with each other, 1/3 of the time they contradicted each other, and 1/3 of the time they did neither!
In fact, the reason that the Puffer Report (1970) recommended a national set of standards was because accreditation standards differed wildly between regions, leading a few college presidents “who had had experience in more than one region” to report that “an institution which might not be accredited in one region would almost certainly be accredited in another and vice versa” (Puffer, Vol. I : 269).
In other words, none of these so-called “quality assurance” programs is really about “quality control” in higher education, but rather are concerned with “assuring” the public (and courts, it seems), that they tax dollars are not going down a rat hole.
Glen McGhee, FHEAP, at 2:40 pm EDT on September 24, 2007
It all depends on what .......... means.
What does ACCOUNTABILITY mean? Oversight or control; collegial relations or adversarial confrontation; conversation or accusation; “feet to the fire” or professional trust; “my way or... the high way."What does COST EFFECTIVE mean? Student services or investor profits; accredited faculty or part time “adjuncts;” education or information; competent students or ROI.
Mary Poppins, at 5:30 pm EDT on September 24, 2007
Oh, the irony
Glen McGhee’s comment about organizational embeddedness and the related difficulty of change was extremely helpful. Yes, that seems an accurate description of the current state of play. But it’s not correct that under such circumstances nothing ever changes. Change can come, but only very slowly. It’s a little like that metaphorical ocean liner: you can’t turn it on a dime, but you can turn it.
In the early 90s, regional accreditors started rewriting their standards to place greater focus on student learning, on “outcomes” as well as the traditional “inputs.” They have continued to ratchet up expectations with each revision of their standards. At the same time, they have applied slow but steady pressure on the institutions they accredit to get with the program.
It is precisely the regional accreditors, with their 5- and 10-year cycles of institutional review and long attention span, that have been able to move institutions slowly but steadily down the path toward creater student- and learning-centeredness. Arguably they’ve done more to p;romote this shift than any other educational, social, economic, or political force out there in the last 25 years. It certainly hasn’t been fast, flashy, or uniform, and there’s a long way to go — but it HAS happened, and it’s happened in ways that are compatible with quality higher education and academic autonomy.
Now it looks as though the Spellings Education Department and allies are looking to destroy the one force that’s actually been able to accomplish something along the lines of what they claim to want. Ironic, isn’t it? But not unfamiliar.
Beatrice, at 9:15 pm EDT on September 25, 2007
Then they came for the educators
Standardization devalues the democratizing role that higher education plays in our society. While it remains vital that we train students for the world of work, our colleges and universities also prepare students to ask penetrating questions, to locate, interpret, and use information, to utilize critical thinking skills in the workplace, and to appreciate the intrinsic worth of the world’s artistic and philosophical traditions. Our colleges and universities prepare Americans to take their place as contributing and participating members of a democratic society. Viewed from a distance, the life of the higher education classroom is like America herself – fiercely independent, creative, and simultaneously community centered. College and university faculty work collegially to tailor classes, programs and services that fit the regional and individual needs of students, and we welcome accountability that assists in this endeavor. At the same time, the thought that operational decisions could become dependent solely on systems that are based at a distance from the day-to-day realities our classrooms and colleges is a matter of significant concern. The increasing demand for external reports is accompanied by ironic decreases in budgetary allowances for the instructional missions of our colleges. At the same time, state and national data bases already contain more than sufficient information to satisfy the needs of legislators and the Department of Education. In our opinion, there is little to be gained and much to be lost by forcing standardization on such a dynamic system, particularly where testing is concerned. Information changes radically in short periods of time. Textbooks are often outdated within a matter of a few years. Standardized tests on the human genome would be outmoded on a six month cycle, and the same applies for other technological and scientific areas. Standardization would force testing compliance on outdated information and establish a bland uniformity with regards to such areas as liberal studies, all at a phenomenal drain on our education budgets. While standardization and detailed accountability dovetail well with corporate and manufacturing models, such is not the case where multiple academic missions of access and support concern the needs of diverse populations of students. Therefore, standardization’s imposition of bureaucracy, unfunded mandates, and blurry generalities would not well serve colleges, students, taxpayers, or our national interest – and voices that resist the Spellings/Miller approach are attempting to safeguard the dynamism that has made America’s public education system a model for the world. The Spellings/Miller assault on regional accreditation and the academy is reminiscent of the misinformation contained in “A Nation at Risk.” Having purchased the media, now the powerbrokers have set their sights on higher education.
Greg Gilbert, at 10:10 am EDT on September 26, 2007
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American Bar Association is a Labor Union
The State Supreme Courts have delegated the accreditation of law schools to the lawyer’s labor union, the American Bar Association. No area of accreditation needs reform more than how lawyers are educated.
Check our presentation to National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity made on December 6, 2006, posted to our website.
William Sumner Scott, J.D. Judicial Equality Foundation, Inc. http://jefound.orgwss@jefound.org
William Sumner Scott, J.D., at 8:00 am EDT on September 24, 2007