Nov. 19, 2007

The Pendulum Swings on Accreditation

Last spring, as the U.S. Education Department convened a set of college officials and accreditors to negotiate possible changes in federal rules governing higher education accreditation, the dominant story line was the government’s aggressive effort to prod accrediting agencies to force colleges to measure and report more quantitative data about their success in educating students.

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Despite the protestations of federal officials, the push was seen by many people as overstepping the department’s authority, and college officials and accreditors were generally united in opposing it — as were leading members of Congress, who ultimately stepped in and demanded that the department put its efforts on hold pending passage of legislation to renew the Higher Education Act.

But overshadowed amid the contention wrought by the department’s tactics was the reality that college leaders and accrediting officials did not entirely see eye to eye on the issue. Yes, they shared the perception that the department’s proposal would represent unwarranted federal intrusion. But negotiators representing the six regional accrediting agencies (as well as those representing career-related colleges) were far more willing than college leaders were to accept the department’s argument that accreditors should demand evidence from colleges that they are educating students, and should have the authority, ultimately, to judge whether a college’s results are sufficient.

When the Education Department’s accreditation negotiations ended in stalemate last June, that rift was papered over — until last week, when an 11th-hour change in House of Representatives legislation to extend the Higher Education Act laid bare the division once again.

After the rule making negotiations collapsed, higher education leaders, working with Congressional aides, incorporated language into the Senate Higher Education Act bill that clearly vested authority for setting goals and measuring success for student learning outcomes in the hands of individual colleges, much to the satisfaction of college and university leaders (and the dismay of Education Department officials).

When Democrats in the House introduced their own version of the Higher Ed Act bill this month, their own language on the role of accreditors in measuring learning outcome largely mirrored the Senate’s, with the similarity in the language virtually ensuring that that approach would stick when Congress ultimately passed the final legislation.

But late Wednesday evening, six hours into the House Education and Labor Committee’s debate over the Higher Education Act legislation, Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) introduced an amendment to strip the language about learning outcomes from the bill. College lobbyists were caught off-guard by the amendment, which passed by voice vote without opposition, and scrambled to figure out where it had come from. The answer: Accrediting agency officials had initiated it, and had done so without telling officials at the major higher education associations.

“I’m shocked at the stupidity of the accreditors in opening up an issue that had been settled in a positive way,” Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, said angrily Wednesday night. The Association of American Universities sent a letter to its members late last week opposing the change, and the association’s weekly summary of developments explained its rationale this way: “The elimination of this important provision opens the door to alternatives that are likely to be unsatisfactory or harmful to the ability of institutions to continue to set their own standards of student achievement based on their institutional mission.”

In interviews Friday, accrediting agency officials said they believed the Senate language, and the provision originally embraced in the House, went too far in giving individual colleges and universities the right to set their own standards for sufficient performance in educating students, and in restricting the ability of accrediting agencies — as the supposed assurer of quality in higher education — to say when a college’s performance fell short.

“The language appeared to us to say that whatever a college says is okay is okay,” said Steven D. Crow, executive director of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. “It appears to make it impossible for us to have a standard where we can ultimately say, ‘The academic performance here is not sufficient.’ “

Crow, who was on the negotiating team during the Education Department’s accreditation rule making process last spring, reiterated his view that the department’s proposed approach to measuring learning outcomes — which he called “extremely obnoxious” — would have gone too far in substituting the authority of the federal government for that of colleges and universities. But the language etched into the Senate bill (and originally into the House bill), he said, went too far the other way.

“The pendulum swung from the department saying, ‘You’re going to have a standard on student achievement, and this is how it’s going to look,’ to one where the institution sets the standard and it’s done in a way that says the accreditor couldn’t say that it wasn’t sufficient,” Crow said. “Our perception is that the language did not give us the ability to weed out poor performers when it comes to learning, and we think our institutions want us to be able to do that.” Crow noted that accrediting groups like his are run by their member colleges and universities, who set the standards for the accrediting associations.

Crow and Elise Scanlon, executive director of the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology, said they had tried to engage officials from the nation’s higher education associations in discussions about the problems the accreditors perceived in the Senate language, with the hope of altering it in the House bill. “But essentially the response was, ‘We’re satisfied with it the way it is and don’t want to change it,’” Crow said.

Scanlon said that she and others knew that if the House approved accreditation language similar to the Senate’s, that would close the door to efforts to refine it later in the legislative process, because House and Senate lawmakers negotiating a compromise between two versions of a piece of legislation are generally restricted to considering only those provisions of a bill on which there are disagreements.

So the accreditors approached Representative Andrews about introducing an amendment that would strip the learning outcomes language from the House bill, “to try to preserve the opportunity for the student achievement language to be clarified” through a conference committee later on, Scanlon said.

“The intention was really to open a dialogue among the institutions and the accrediting community, to try to determine where the appropriate balance is in establishing some sort of standard that makes sense,” Scanlon said. The intention, she and others said, is for new, compromise language to be introduced at the time that the full House takes up the Higher Education Act bill, presumably in December.

Lobbyists for higher education associations say that they had been unaware that accreditors were unhappy with the Senate language on student learning outcomes, and that contrary to Crow’s assertion, they had not rebuffed efforts to discuss it.

They also expressed skepticism that a “dialogue” like the one Scanlon envisions can produce agreement on an approach that will satisfy all parties, given that months of discussion during the federal rule making negotiations failed to produce such an accord. (Crow, for his part, expresses hope that agreement will be possible now because the parties are “confronted with the urgency of a piece of legislation.")

But more importantly, say college leaders, the accreditors may have done more than initiate a discussion between accrediting officials and college leaders, as they intended. They may also have reopened the door to the Education Department to return to the bargaining table to push its approach to measuring student learning, to which the accrediting agencies themselves objected last spring. “What they did was to reopen the entire topic to anything and everything, including the entry of the department,” said Timmons of the American Council on Education.

A Senate aide confirmed that members of Congress have “been having conversations” with representatives of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings about the Higher Education Act language surrounding accreditation and student learning outcomes, and that lawmakers have expressed a willingness to involve the department in discussions about the final shape of that language. This aide disagrees with the accreditors’ view that the Senate and original House language would preclude accrediting agencies from setting standards for colleges to meet.

The accreditors “have really opened the barn door wide to the secretary getting another shot at what she wants,” the Congressional aide said. “On the other hand, I think Spellings has recognized the perceived heavy-handedness of her previous approach, and has been sending signals that she’s willing to engage in a positive dialogue.”

An Education Department spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said department officials “look forward to continuing to work with Congress on accreditation.”

— Doug Lederman

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Comments

H.R. 4137

This is truly outstanding reporting by Doug, about very important events unfolding on Capitol Hill.

All the important players are here: Senate, House, accreditors, and the colleges and universities, and even the Secretary of Education; and we see all them in action. And the action is complicated, filled with cross-cutting tensions.

Much of the disagreement between the accreditors, Congress (depending what mood it is in), the Secretary, and the institutions regarding measures of student achievement stems from differing interpretations of the circumstances surrounding the passage of the 1992 amendments to the Higher Education Act, which were then reiterated again in the 1998 amendments. (See: http://home.earthlink.net/~fheapblog/id9.html )

Yet these Congressional mandates were never implemented by the Secretary of Education, and the current controversies about monitoring and reporting student achievement stem from this failure to implement them, as well as other criteria, including those pertaining to faculty qualifications.

Colleges and universities now take for granted Sec. Riley’s standardless standards of 1992, without realizing that these very same issues are now being revisited by the ongoing debate about the need to reform accreditation.

On the other hand, the accreditors are aware of the sea-change, and both the regionals and the nationals are attempting to lead in the direction of change, starting first with nullifying the Senate’s gross misinterpretation of HEA 1992 through Rep. Andrew’s amendment.

This, of course, is what caught the schools off guard, and what challenges their complacent taken-for-grantedness.

But the House proposal (HR 4137) contains its own bloopers: Sec 851-856, the so-called Diploma Mill Prevention law.

If there is any concern to be shown for the proper delegation of powers in HE accreditation, it truly mystifies me that a legislative abortion such as this (which clearly breaches the established balance of powers and responsibilities) could have crept onto the legislative agenda without notice. One would think that the accreditors and schools would have agreed on eliminating it, once they patched up their petty quarrel.

But that quarrel is ongoing, and no one seemed to notice that Sec. 854 establishes a Task Force that can be unleashed on colleges and universities:

“The Task Force shall develop guidelines, to be used for the development of Federal legislation, to identify degree-granting institutions as legitimate or fraudulent degree-granting institutions for Federal purposes.”

This represents a massive breach of the delicate balance of powers and duties of the Higher Education gatekeeping triad, something to be feared by institutions as well as their accrediting agencies.

Bringing the federal government in to begin to make decisions pertaining to the accreditation of individual institutions represents an unprecedented level of federal interference.

(Lest I confuse others: I am in no way backing away from the need for accreditation reform. In my opinion Sec. 851ff would muddy the waters — regarding who does what in the triad — so badly that reform would be impossible. When accreditation reform begins, it must do so within the sharply defined outline of the gatekeeping triad, and not when it is unclear who has responsibility for defining what a diploma mill is or is not.)

Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 9:15 am EST on November 19, 2007

Curriculum is the responsibility of faculty, and defining and assessing the progress of student learning in relation to articulated outcomes is an essential aspect of curricular and pedagogical design. Since outcomes are ineluctably tied to curriculum, it make sense for colleges and universities to define their learning outcomes in relation to their mission. While faculty have developed a wide range of methods for assessing the individual learning of individual students in their respective courses, colleges and universities have lagged behind in being able to present information at the institutional level about what students actually know and can do upon graduation. Over the past decade, accrediting agencies have played a key tole in helping universities to develop institutional approaches to assessing what their students have learned. In recent years, many schools and colleges have developed electronic portfolios not only to document the intellectual journey of individual students but also to aggregrate what students know and can do in ways that can provide institutional documentation of student learning outcomes, and, potentially, can be compared with peer institutions. The point is that accrediting agencies have played a key role in serving as one catalyst for schools and colleges to develop ways to assess the learning outcomes specified by the faculty of each university according to its mission. These are distinct roles: faculty define the curriculum and outcomes; accrediting agencies ensure these defined outcomes are being assessed at the institutional level, and provide advice when needed. If any language in this bill alters those roles, either by diminishing the role of faculty in determining curriculum, including learning outcomes,or changing the assurance role of accreditors into a curricular role, there is indeed a dangerous opening for federal intervention in college education that could be just as harmful as the NCLB Act has been in many schools.

Sharon Hamilton, Professor of English at IUPUI, at 9:35 am EST on November 19, 2007

Governance of Associations & Accrediting Agencies

The fued between the the accreditors and the Washington based institutional associations points out two glaring problems that has existed for years: (1) too few presidents of major institutions are willing to bother with the governance of the regionals. They tend to look for a national platform, and thus are more attacted to the national associations. The accreditation of their institutions is rarely called into question. Moreover, already at the pinacle on the prestige scale, they generally aren’t interested in a common measure of learning outcomes that could lower their status and devalue their degrees. (2) Presidents and deans of less pretigious instituions who are largely hand-picked by staff and are more easily influenced by them tend to run the regionals.

Unlike the regional agency staffs, both, it seems, are happy with the long standing practice of provide us with all the money we need, but stay out of our sandbox.

On balance, higher education serves the nation well. But don’t expect the resistence to accountability to change. Neither will the conflict in governance among higher education’s agencies go away. The time of the presidents of the leading institutions is too precious to bother with the regionals. They can’t miss the Roman circus on Saturdays.

Higher Ed Diogenes

Higher Ed Diogenes, at 10:10 am EST on November 19, 2007

Stupid?

“Higher education Diogense” has it pretty right. The Washington-based presidential organizations are all about protecting institutional prerogatives, not advocating what’s good for the country. What’s sad is the unabashed arrogance behind the presumption of the Washington-based presidential groups, evidenced by Becky Timmons’ calling the regionals “stupid” because they dared to ‘go around’ the associations. I dare say the regional directors know a lot more about quality assurance than lobbyists who have never been outside of Washington. This argument is about control, period, not public policy.

Me Too, at 11:25 am EST on November 19, 2007

Quality control is a state issue

The feds and the accreditors are arguing with each other over who is responsible for qualitative oversight of colleges, while the colleges want to be left alone. In fact, all U.S. colleges, except for the military academies and some tribal schools, get their legal authority to issue degrees from states, and it is states who are ultimately reponsible to the public for the quality of those schools.

That is why states like California have gone into a Mobius loop of blame and mutual harm among agencies and schools: the state has not been performing its duties and now, according to a court decision, it has to start doing so again. Contrast this to states like Ohio, Minnesota or, until recently, Texas, where qualitative oversight is a serious matter.

Glen McGhee’s comments are always worth reading, but in this case I hope he will allow me to defend the anti-diploma-mill provision in the proposed law. The federal government needs some kind of baseline for its own purposes through which degrees can be screened for validity.

I think Glen would agree with me that using accreditation would screen out some legitimate colleges — not many, but some. I am sorry to say that state approval can’t be used by itself owing to poor oversight in states like Alabama and Hawaii, where a bullfrog could probably be licensed to issue degrees. Therefore it is a good thing that the feds are looking to establish their own standards for their own purposes.

Alan Contreras, State of Oregon, at 11:25 am EST on November 19, 2007

re: HE Diogenes

HE Diogenes comments are pleasantly nuanced and very insightful: “too few presidents of major institutions are willing to bother with the governance of the regionals ... they generally aren’t interested in a common measure of learning outcomes that could lower their status and devalue their degrees”

It wasn’t until 1952, at the last minute so to speak, that New England even had a regional accreditor. No one in that region was concerned about quality, with a very long tradition already in place.

(2) Presidents and deans of less pretigious instituions who are largely hand-picked by [regional] staff and are more easily influenced by them tend to run the regionals.

Fascinating! I always wondered who the “dominating elites” at the regionals were. But this view discounts grassroots pressure, e.g., the disappearance of faculty standards (see my link), which I view as the capitulation of *staff* after decades of concerted effort resulting in total failure in the field.

And this does not explain the new concern coming from the regionals (and nationals), either — unless you think they are worried about perceived legitimacy of *their* product (schools and accreditors, both).

Glen S. McGhee, FHEAP, at 11:25 am EST on November 19, 2007

accreditation

Doug,

Your report was excellent. Congratulations! There is a natural tension between accreditors and institutions and their associations. While neither wants Federal intrusion, the accreditors want to be able to crack down on low-performing institutions. In that sense, I agree with Steve Crow. The dust-up between them over the Andrews amendment is unfortunate but ultimately reflects the tension. I continue to believe that the associations are too defensive about Spellings andother issues. But surely people of good will can work out their differences over the Andrews amendment.

Bob Atwell, at 11:35 am EST on November 19, 2007

diploma mill suppression in HR 4137

In a comment to an earlier story, Mr. McGhee wrote: “This role [to ‘develop guidelines... to identify degree-granting institutions as legitimate or fraudulent degree-granting institutions for Federal purposes’] is, and has been, the sole perogative [sic] of the federally designated accreditors...”

Note that the Task Force can address the troubling matter of supposedly foreign institutions which are, in reality, diploma mills operating from an offshore base. The USDE scope of recognition of accreditors is restricted to the accreditors’ activities regarding domestic universities. Since many diploma mills pretend to be foreign schools, the Task Force will be able to address a problem that is presently outside the domain of the USDE-supervised accreditation system.

Mr. McGhee also wrote: “...it is unclear to me what Sec. 851-856 would accomplish, other than destabilize an already fragile regulatory scheme.”

Here are some (but not all) of the things accomplished by Sections 851-856.

Section 851 (PURPOSE; DEFINITIONS) casts into law a clear definition of the term “diploma mill.”

Section 852 (RECOGNIZED ACCREDITING AGENCIES AND INSTITUTIONS) instructs USDE to collect and organize information concerning foreign institutions so that degrees from foreign schools can be considered for use in a federal context. This will allow the federal government to draw a clear distinction between the University of Liberia and, say, St. Regis “University” for purposes of immigration and employment.

Section 853 (ACCREDITING AGENCIES) puts the weight of law behind what is presently nothing more than a recommendation from the Federal Trade Commission. I am referring to “Guides for Private Vocational and Distance Education Schools, Part 254″ ( http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/guides/vocation-gd.htm ): see “254.3 Misrepresentation of extent or nature of accreditation or approval.” The FTC views this as recommendation, rather than regulation.

Section 854 (TASK FORCE) creates a mechanism for consideration of some of the more challenging issues regarding the suppression of diploma mills including enforcement strategies. This, to my mind, is one of the most important subjects for the Task Force.

Section 855 (SENSE OF THE CONGRESS REGARDING USE BY STATES OF THE FEDERAL PLAN AS GUIDE LINES) allows a direct comment by the federal government to the states regarding the importance of attention to this issue. As it is, we have a few states with standards that are so lax and enforcement so ineffective that they provide safe haven for diploma mills involved in launching fake medical schools into the world. Do recall that a number of customers of the “St. Luke School of Medicine” have been incarcerated for their activities, but that the (American) operators of this supposedly Liberian, Ghanaian, Californian, Texan, and Kentuckian monstrosity are out and about, selling patent medicines, issuing degrees, and selling stock in a company that claimed to market a cure for skin cancer.

Section 856 (UNFAIR AND DECEPTIVE ACTS AND PRACTICES REGARDING DIPLOMAS AND PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATIONS) instructs the FTC to develop a plan of action. At the present time, the FTC’s model of culpability as it pertains to diploma mills is too indirect to allow them to go after the mills. See the FTC’s material concerning the 2003 action against the University Degree Program for more information on this subject.

George Gollin, Professor of Physics at University of Illinois, at 1:00 pm EST on November 19, 2007

Federal Intrusion

I feel strongly that any more federal intrusion would be disastrous to the American higher education system. One needs only to look at what federal policy has done to the public schools to see how damaging excess federal involvement can be. Of course a natural tension needs to exist to keep universities and accreditation programs highly effective, but to allow more federal government involvement would be to upset that balance.

Aprile, at 1:00 pm EST on November 19, 2007

Pendulum Swings on Accreditation

The accreditation and outcomes assessment arguments are about whether students are learning anything and, to that end, about the quality and integrity of the evidence produced by colleges and universities to demonstrate these outcomes. Surely no serious observer of campus life or of the Washington associations would leave these matters up to the universities themselves?

If we needed Sarbanes-Oxley to monitor deceit in the corporate boardroom, why don’t we need credible measures of college and university performance—monitored, if not managed, by those with no direct stake in the findings?

Inside Higher Ed is so much better at reporting these issues than the Chronicle! It’s a pleasure to read the analyses to understand who the players are and what they are up to.

Speaking of players, however, it has apparently escaped the notice of many commentators on the accreditation dispute that students, parents, and taxpayers (those who pay the piper in the public sector and—through financial aid guarantees—in the private sector as well) are nowhere to be found in the discussion of these issues. Who is speaking for their interests?

Sheldon, at 7:40 pm EST on November 19, 2007

For those of us who participated in the negotiated rulemaking sessions held with the Department earlier this year, it is a puzzling observation to hear that “Spellings has recognized the perceived heavy-handedness of her previous approach,” when in fact the meetings were far more reflective and open, save for those to whom real debate on the outcomes/accountability issue was simply intolerable. As to be expected in a process requiring “consensus” as a condition of agreement, the rulemaking discussions were marked by initial posturing, more politely termed positions, by all sides followed by the necessary compromising in search of common ground. Most of the participants around the table recognized the changing times, particularly the need for fewer platitudes and better measures of learning outcomes. It is a credit to both the regional and national accrediting agency spokepersons, prominently represented by Crow and Scanlon, as well as to the Department’s, that some real leadership was speaking to the real issues. Fifteen years after the 1992 HEA Amendments called for accrediting agencies to to address “success with respect to student achievement...” in their evaluations, and with so little to show for it, we should be less fearful of opening the “barn doors” and far more concerned that the overall quality of our higher education system is no longer being accepted on faith alone. We all deserve better and could do much more.

RJW, at 2:25 pm EST on November 19, 2007

goin’ global

I’m listening to Alan and George ’bout HE accreditation goin’ global in HR 4137.

If the feds need international accreditation for “Federal purposes” (too open-ended, could end up meaning anything), why not delegate this to a confederation of accreditors, like CHEA?

All the Secretary of Education has to do is recognize another agency with “international” scope under existing regulations. Any problems with that? Parallel accreditation tracks mean train wrecks somewhere down the line.

In fact, with globalization, this collision is bound to happen when the US and China, etc., try to integrate.

Glen McGhee, FHEAP, at 2:25 pm EST on November 19, 2007

Is this really about quality?

If I read Steve Crow’s comments correctly, he is arguing that accreditors that lack specific academic standards or criteria do not really have the ability to say to a college that the quality of the education is not sufficient. Thus, they need the help of legislation that says the accreditor has the final say. But it must be remembered that accreditors are membership organizations. Steve is the President of one such organization. Is her arguing that his membership really wants him to push in this direction? It seems hard to imagine a liberal arts college, for example, arguing that an entity outside itself should be the arbiter of the assessment (really the curriculum and institutional mission) results. This seems to go down the road of compliance (it is or is not good enough) rather than a discussion with any particular college on ways to improve. Would this narrow “quality” to mean jobs for students? Certainly the Secretary of Ed’s comments in the last 2 years have been filled with references to the workplace. If the accreditor is left as the ultimate arbiter, it is left to decide if the mission of a college is sufficient. On the face of it, this seems to go to the core of college independence and beyond accountability.

JAM, at 11:05 am EST on November 20, 2007

Accreditation Accountability and the Feds

I have appreciated reading all the preceding thoughts on this dilemma. I wonder if anyone sees a parallel with the “No Child Left Behind Act". One might recall reading in a recent issue of Time Magazine what the states said they had achieved in terms of learning outcomes, using their own measurement standards, and what they had done when evaluated against the No Child requirements. And, of course, we need not speak of the biases held by some against certain segments of the higher education community, which would be too embarrassing if stated openly.

Eugene A. Eaves, Provost/VCAA (Retired) at NCCU, at 3:40 pm EST on November 20, 2007

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