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July 1
Twisting in the Wind
Once upon a time, the American Academy for Liberal Education was the darling of neoconservative politicians. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the administration of George W. Bush killed it?
Related stories
- Foreseeing the Future of Accreditation, June 30
- ‘Last Bite at the Apple’ on Accreditation?, June 5
- The Future of Accreditation?, March 24
- A Little Help From Its Friends?, Feb. 28
- Someone Didn’t Get the Memo, Dec. 19
Supporters of the agency fear that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings may do the deed by inaction. Seven months ago, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the secretary on accreditation matters, recommended that Spellings lift a restriction that bars the liberal education accreditor from approving new institutions. In March, certain members of Spellings’s own staff, in the Office of Postsecondary Education, recommended that the department give AALE even more latitude — not only lifting the ban on accrediting new institutions, but extending its federal recognition for the standard five years, instead of the one that the advisory panel had urged.
But days have turned to weeks and weeks to months since those recommendations, and there has been no word from the secretary. In an interview Monday, the secretary’s chief of staff, David Dunn, insisted that there is no conspiracy and that, in fact, there really is no delay. The recommendations are now undergoing an “independent legal review and analysis” by an administrative hearings office within the department, Dunn said, and it would be “very much outside the normal process” for the secretary to step in before that review has occurred. And seven months, he added, is “not outside the normal range on these type of things,” he said.
“It is not being held up, hung up. This is the normal deliberative process.”
Officials of the accrediting agency and some of its supporters — including Diane Auer Jones, who until May was responsible for federal accreditation policy as assistant secretary for postsecondary education — are troubled nonetheless by the delay and by their perception that the agency is being unfairly treated. “I can’t say seven months is unusual, but I can say it’s unacceptable,” Jones, who left the department in large part because of its stance on accreditation, said in an interview Monday. Unacceptable, she and others say, because the department held the agency to a different standard in punishing it so severely originally, and because the delay in righting that wrong threatens to sink the accreditor.
The liberal education agency continues to live in a sort of limbo — or purgatory, depending on one’s view — in which the colleges it now accredits and those would-be future candidates are unsure about its vitality, if not its survival. From 1995 to 2006, two institutions accredited by the AALE decided to end their affiliation with the agency. In the less than two years since the accreditor came into the sights of the Education Department’s leaders — and in many ways became the poster child for their desire to prod accreditors to hold colleges accountable for how effectively they measure student learning — between a third and half of the colleges and programs AALE accredits in the United States have jumped ship.
Few of the institutions’ leaders have openly told the accreditor’s officials that its perceived troubles with the Education Department are to blame, but other explanations are hard to find. “Places don’t want to deal with it,” says Jeffrey Martineau, the agency’s vice president for accreditation. “The thinking seems to be, ‘Your problem will somehow rub off on us.’”
So what is the accrediting agency’s problem, in the eyes of department officials? AALE’s main offense, a stream of transcripts and reports over the last 20 months shows, is that its leaders were perceived as rebuffing the Education Department’s intensifying efforts (in the wake of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education) to compel accreditors (and by extension the colleges they accredit) to more rigorously assess and measure the learning outcomes of students.
The liberal education accreditor had what in retrospect looks to have been the bad luck to come before the accreditation advisory panel, known as NACIQI, in late 2006 just as the panel and the department’s staff were beginning to take a tougher stance on learning outcomes. Then in and in the months leading up to that meeting, Jeffrey D. Wallin, the academy’s outspoken president, had the temerity to question whether it was wise to try to measure the fruits of liberal education using the sorts of objective and standardized measures that department officials seemed increasingly to favor.
In that December 2006 meeting, and in exchanges with department officials in advance of that meeting, Wallin did, he acknowledges, “resist” the department’s pressure to quantify learning outcomes, out of a desire to “make a principled point” that it wasn’t sound or even possible to try to measure the performance of the sorts of liberal arts programs that AALE accredits with objective measures.
But after department staff members at the December 2006 meeting made clear that the “national discussions” led by the department’s political leaders had led the federal agency to focus more on “measurable outcomes,” and the advisory panel took the harsh step of essentially recommending a freeze on the AALE’s ability to accredit new institutions, Wallin and his group got with the Bush administration’s program.
By the time the group next appeared before the advisory panel, in December 2007, the academy had adopted a new mechanism that required the colleges it accredits to collect and report outcomes each year on at least three quantitative student achievement measures (such as graduation rates, graduate program entrance test scores, enrollment in graduate schools, etc.), and to show how they compare to a selected set of peer institutions. That accountability system was more rigorous, AALE and its supporters pointed out, than most other non-vocational accrediting agencies — and yet when the agency was set to appear before NACIQI in December 2007, the department’s staff members recommended that the advisory panel sustain the freeze on accrediting new members. (The freeze permits the agency to consider members who seek to have an individual program — like an honors’ college — accredited, but bars it from providing the more coveted “institutional” accreditation that carries with it access to federal student aid.)
When the advisory panel made its recommendation in mid-December, after members of Congress had sent clear signals of displeasure with the department’s aggressive push on student learning outcomes, it recommended that Spellings lift the restriction barring the accreditor from examining new colleges, though it also agreed with the staff recommendation that Spellings extend the agency’s recognition for only one year, instead of the standard five.
The academy appealed the panel’s recommendation, and last March, Jones, then the assistant secretary for postsecondary education, and the counsel for the Office for Postsecondary Education, Sally L. Wanner, responded to the AALE appeal by recommending that Spellings grant recognition to the accrediting group for the full five years and lift the ban on accrediting new members.
“[T]he process AALE has developed for collecting and analyzing student achievement data is novel, innovative and rigorous,” Wanner wrote on Jones’s behalf. In that and other ways, the officials noted, AALE had come into compliance with the department’s findings against it.
What Jones did not say in that memo, but is saying now that she has left the department, is that it seems clear to her that the liberal education accreditor is “being held to a double standard” because the agency originally rebuffed the push by the department’s political leaders to embrace standardized measures for assessing the quality of the liberal arts students its colleges generally produced.
“The real question isn’t why [AALE’s fate] is still hanging in the balance,” said Jones, who said that her views on accreditation and the importance of the liberal arts had clearly lost favor among the department’s political leaders. “The real question is how they got there in the first place. Why? Because they are a liberal arts accreditor that was seen as not answering the questions the right way.”
AALE officials would certainly prefer not to have gotten into these straits in the first place, but for them, the key now is getting out of the predicament. Not only has its situation chased away existing members, but it has deterred would-be candidates for programmatic accreditation.
“A school sees something vague about the agency being denied recognition by the secretary, and it looks awful,” said Wallin, AALE’s president. “It has clearly injured our reputation, and we’re not sure how long it’s going to take to repair.”
Wallin declined to discuss the financial impact the department’s actions have had, but for an accrediting agency, lost members mean lost dues, and dues pay the bills. “The situation is very serious,” he said. “We cannot stay in this limbo forever.”
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Comments
AALE saga continues
It is important that NACIQI and its activities, and the higher ed accreditation process itself be kept in front of the public — it is too little understood.
There are two complementary aspects of the process that the AALE story demonstrates.
The first is the fact that nothing like this would have happened to NCA or SACS — the “too big to fail” regional accreditors. Also know as the “Atomic Bomb” problem, this is a major obstacle to accreditation reform in this country, and the reason that the Puffer Report in the 1970s recommended breaking the regional guilds apart into regions of more manageable sizes.
The other related point is that the tiny accreditor lacks the status and prestige of the larger accreditors, and this is the reason for the perceived “double standard.”
The loss of institutional support of AALE, I think, demonstates the hierarchical political economy of higher ed accreditation: with the apparent loss of AALE’s legitimacy, those institutions aligned with it also stand to lose legitimacy, and for that reason, have moved on to other, more powerful guild representation. Accreditation associations are, afterall, mutual benefit societies.
This story highlights the disparate treatment of AALE and the powerful regional associations, but not the reasons behind it. For this reason, special thanks go to IHE for informing the American public about the workings of our “quality assurance” program in higher education.
Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 7:30 am EDT on July 1, 2008
Total Quality Management
Quality = Satisfying the Customers Needs and Expectations.
Quality = Delighting the Customer
This state of affairs is intriguing to say the least. As a dyed-in-the-wool, right-wing Libertarian, I am inclined to ask the federal government to get out of this higher education accreditation business and let the market decide. That – in a sane world – should be right up the alley of us neocons.
Only trouble is the first-level customers of higher education (aka students) are looking for a product that is quite different from the product the suppliers (aka tenured professors) would like to deliver ... and Margaret Spellings and the Bush Administration’s Department of Education are caught in the middle.
In general, those tenured profs are defenders of the status quo, and their inattention to anything other than the locations of their offices, their teaching schedules (fewer is better), their travel budgets, and the frequency of their sabbatical leaves has allowed the academy to evolve in a way that is in almost no one’s best interest.
I say “almost” because even though the second-level customers of higher education (aka the American “business” community) are upset with the product of higher education, the students, while not completely “satisfied,” are not dissatisfied either.
The problem, of course, is that the suppliers – not that they care that much about their customers’ needs and expectations to begin with – find it much easier to talk in terms of platitudes that emphasize education (and, truth be known, during the past six decades I think they’ve lost sight of what that’s all about) and both the first- and second-level customers are interested in job training. The students, especially, are barely interested in education at all ... e.g., 42% of college graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
http://www.humorwriters.org/startlingstats.html
I encourage you to rationalize to your heart’s content, but what other explanation is there for the spectacular success of the for-profit quasi degree mills that are inching even closer to domination of the American “educational scene. The students’ mantra is “You pays yer fees an you git yer degrees.” And then, of course, you get a job (if you’re lucky) and, God willing, you will never have to think about that stuff again ... ever.
To summarize ... when suppliers’ products and customers’ needs and expectations are as disparate as they are in higher education today, it is no wonder the government wants to jump in and settle the affair. And, (1) poor suppliers, it will be really difficult for them to take time away from their cushy jobs to address such a mundane problem, (2) poor government officials, they’re not the brightest lights in the firmament to begin with, so what’s a poor politician to do, (3) poor level-one customers, who want to know who these head-cases are who keep cluttering their pursuit of a degree (certification) with all of these “education” obstacles.
It makes you wonder what Jimmy Carter was thinking when he signed the Departments of Education and Energy into law during his short, troubled tenure in the office of the President.
Frizbane Manley, at 10:20 am EDT on July 1, 2008
Not ....
It is reassuring to know that at least someone has this assessment challenge all figured out. The eLumen Collaborative apparently did it. They’ve got “the mechanisms.” Not. And not hardly. Not even close – because no one does yet. And esp. not when it comes to the type of education focused on in this article: the true, traditional liberal arts education. Not one focused on training someone to do jet engine mechanics, helping an adult retrain or get back into the workforce, or giving someone the basic ability to read or some other foundational skill that they should have gotten in high school but for whatever reason(s) did not. Rather, real education in a broad set of disciplines, done for the sake of that education and for the vital function of passing on the great knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that humankind has developed over the centuries. And BTW, it turns out that such an education is a fabulous skill set for the worlds of work, the creativity and ability to integrate multiple facts and fields, to synthesize and to develop solutions, etc., etc. It is everything that the rote, rigid, grinds that (say) Chinese education simply does not and cannot provide. The very idea that anyone can claim that “Such mechanisms have, in fact, been developed over the past five years ...” is simply not true. Being able to really understand, much less to honestly, accurately, and reliably measure, student by student, what four years at a top-rated liberal arts college actually does, remains a very difficult, elusive, goal for those who work in higher education research. No one has the understanding, much less “the mechanisms,” to do this. We need to recognize such posts for what they actually are: this is a shameless commercial plug, from a.com consulting company, to try to push its wares. Nothing more.
SeenItAllBefore, at 10:50 am EDT on July 1, 2008
Credential markets and Credential Inflation
I quite enjoy Manley’s perspectives and learn from him,too.
But in this case, I am afraid the dialectics of credential markets and credential inflation are more than a classical eco-neo-con can handle.
He asks,"...what other explanation is there for the spectacular success of the for-profit quasi degree mills that are inching even closer to domination of the American educational scene.”
The answer is that education and jobs have a strangle hold on the distribution of wealth in postindustrial society, and any investment perceived to increase ones chances in the competition for jobs will be eagerly sought out by the combatants.
The result is predictable, of course, and I have a whole section devoted to credential inflation (including grade inflation) at the link below.
Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at FHEAP, at 11:00 am EDT on July 1, 2008
A Larger Crisis of Leadership
Anyone closely watching the higher education policy leadership at Education over the past two years should not be surprised by this story. The Under Secretary’s office, led by a team with 1) little appreciation for the market forces that built our higher education system into the leading position it has long enjoyed and 2) precious little practical experience in higher ed practice or policy, has through neglect and miscalculation done lasting damage to higher ed policy from accreditation to accountability to finance. Add to the neglect and miscalculation an apparent insecurity that has systematically marginalized or even excluded the voices of dissenters and experts — like Ms. Jones and Ms. Wanner, among many others — and you have a prescription for the crisis of leadership plaguing the Department’s higher education policy apparatus today.
GraceEng, at 11:55 am EDT on July 1, 2008
Responses to Glen S. McGhee and GraceEng
Glen S. McGhee:
You wrote in response to my question about the growth and imminent domination of the “for-profit quasi degree mills” ...
“The answer is that education and jobs have a strangle hold on the distribution of wealth in postindustrial society, and any investment perceived to increase one’s chances in the competition for jobs will be eagerly sought out by the combatants.”
That’s precisely what I intended to say, except that I like to make a distinction between education and training. In your sentence I would have either put education in quotation marks or I would have replaced it with “training.” I guess I didn’t do a good job of expressing myself.
1. (Tenured) faculty, when they think about it at all, want to sell education.
2. Students very definitely want to purchase job training. They want a product that has little to do with education.
3. Businesses (prospective employers) want competent employees and at least middle-class consumers, not informed citizens (the legacy of Henry Ford).
4. Government usually sides with business (where money can be got to buy votes) and consumers (who pay taxes).
5. Dysfunctional asymmetry of objectives and assessment strategies ensues.
GraceEng
I agree with everything you said except ...
“... market forces ... built our higher education system into the leading position it has long enjoyed ...”
First, I think market forces had very little to do with it ... except that while our higher education system was building its reputation, it was, for the most part, a very elitist enterprise that was reflective of a verrry narrow market.
Second, there are approximately 4,100 colleges and universities in the United States, 2,363 four-year colleges and universities and 1,721 two-year colleges. Focusing attention on only the four-year schools (and this is strictly my guess), something on the order of 50 (max) have given the U.S. its reputation as having the best higher education system in the world. That’s about 2%. The vast majority of the lower 90% are really pretty mediocre communities of scholars.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=200891
At any given time, a very tiny fraction of the students in the U.S. are participating in that segment of our higher education system that is responsible for our reputation. And, by the way, the rest of the world is much less impressed with our “dominance” – even at the top – than they used to be.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/06/carey
Frizbane Manley, at 1:10 pm EDT on July 1, 2008
How can the author say “In the less than two years since the accreditor came into the sights of the Education Department’s leaders” when AALE has been chided repeatedly by NACIQI going back to 2001, long before Spellings?
I, for one, am tired of the pretense at play here — that if you’re not for AALE, you’re against the liberal arts. AALE is a poorly run organization that, year after year, has not done what it told NACIQI that it would do. Go read the transcripts from their appearances before the committee. What you’ll see is a exceedingly tolerant NACIQI and a bungling incomprehensible AALE.
AALE does not represent the liberal arts very well, in my opinion. Supporters of a less quantitative and broad education would do much better to let AALE pass away; NACIQI is doing you a favor. Let a real organization like ISI (isi.org) birth a new competent liberal arts accreditor worthy of the position.
Kysa Beringer, at 10:10 pm EDT on July 1, 2008
The Proof of the Cake
Kysa Beringer’s remarks about AALE are extremely unfair and biased. The major bone of contention between this accreditor and NACIQI has always been the fact that AALE insists the results of a final examination and similar methods are not sufficiently accurate in assessing quality od education. They are the only accreditors that have insisted on submisssion of annual reports from their accredited colleges to include data on thier graduates one year and three years after graduation. This data should indicate the graduates’ rate of absorbtion in the job market and/or continutation of their studies at postgraduate level. This is something that the Regionals neither would ask nor would dare to ask from their wards. After all, it is the accredited institutions that control the Regional and similar accreditor and not the other way around. AALE, relying mainly on the good offices of distinguished independent peer assessors, and therefore not requiring the large (and largley inefficient) personnel of the other accreditors, have provided the best services at the least cost to their accredited institutions. It is only fair to look at the success rate of the graduates of the colleges accredited by AALE to determine what a major role they have played in the expansion of liberal education both at home and overseas.
Matt Wartell, Director of Information at American University for Humanities, at 4:35 pm EDT on July 6, 2008
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I am struck by how much conceptual distance there is between the offered graduation statistics and test scores, on the one hand, and the educational ends that most of us would agree to be the desired result of liberal education. In yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed article, Diane Auer Jones was quoted as saying that accrediting agencies and colleges should develop mechanisms by which academic institutions can say “This is our mission, these are the outcomes that the educational opportunities we provide should generate, and this is how we’re measuring to make sure we provide what we say we provide.” Such mechanisms have, in fact, been developed over the past five years and are beginning to be used, but the denizens of Washington DC (on both sides of this discussion) appear to be entirely unaware of them.
David Shupe, eLumen Collaborative, at 6:30 am EDT on July 1, 2008