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Whither Accreditation?

January 28, 2009

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WASHINGTON -- Over the last two years, the U.S. system of higher education accreditation survived what Stanley O. Ikenberry characterized Tuesday as only the latest in a string of "near-death experiences," in which criticism of the industry's self-regulation mechanism escalated to the point that its fundamental nature seemed in doubt. Ikenberry, president emeritus of the University of Illinois, former president of the American Council on Education, and one of higher education's silver-haired eminences, was among the 200 or so accrediting and college officials who gathered here this week for the Council for Higher Education Accreditation's annual meeting. And while Ikenberry, now a Regent professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, cited the history of threats in part to show that accreditation is resilient, he -- like most of the speakers -- argued that higher education leaders should seize this moment to make changes designed to ensure that they continue to control their own destiny.

"I don't sense that we're in a state of crisis," Ikenberry said, noting as several other speakers did that Congress, in renewing the Higher Education Act last summer, had staved off changes proposed by the Bush administration in the the structure and federal oversight of accreditation, designed to more fully shift its purpose from a mechanism for institutional self-improvement to a way of assuring quality control in higher education.

"But it is precisely when you're not [in crisis] that you need to think about change and how to position yourself for the future.... We came through that reasonably well, but also with a wakeup call that before we have to move through another reauthorization, we should be thinking carefully about the question of where we take accreditation."

Those questions -- does higher education's system of peer review need to change, and how? -- are at the core of the accreditation council's CHEA Initiative, and Tuesday's conversation was designed to stimulate ideas about how college leaders and accrediting officials might, on their own, alter the accreditation system, both to improve it and, not unimportantly, to ward off future efforts by politicians and others from outside higher education to impose potentially more severe and less thoughtful changes.

"There is every reason to believe that these issues will be on the agenda" of the Obama administration just as they were of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, said Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

Ikenberry laid out several ways in which he believed accreditation needed to change to both maintain its utility as a voluntary peer review system and to reassure policy makers that higher education is worthy of taxpayers' investments in it. Foremost among them was the role of accreditors in continuing to prod colleges to measure the learning outcomes of students, which is also the goal of two new organizations that Ikenberry and other college leaders announced at last week's meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

The most provocative vision for changing accreditation put forward at Tuesday's meeting came from Robert C. Dickeson, president emeritus of the University of Northern Colorado. Dickeson's presentation was loaded with irony, in some ways; a position paper he wrote in 2006 as a consultant to Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education was harshly critical of the current system of accreditation (calling it rife with conflicts of interest and decidedly lacking in transparency) and suggested replacing the regional accrediting agencies with a "national accreditation foundation" that would establish national standards for colleges to meet.

Dickeson's presentation Tuesday acknowledged that there remained legitimate criticisms of accreditation's rigor and agility, noting that many colleges and accrediting agencies still lacked good information about student learning outcomes "40 years after the assessment movement began in higher education."

But Dickeson's primary message this time around was that last year's Higher Education Act renewal amounted to the "most intrusive" incursion by the government in the affairs of colleges "in the history of higher education," given the reams of new regulatory requirements on matters large and small. Given that unwanted intervention, he said, "It should be clear to the accreditation and higher education communities that a new model for quality assurance is needed, if for no other reason than to forestall future federal intrusion that may have even more deleterious effects."

His paper thoughtfully laid out several alternatives to the current system, including replacing it with a mechanism similar to the Federal Accounting Standards Board. But Dickeson ultimately recommended that the Council for Higher Education Accreditation seek a Congressional charter that would strengthen its hand as the central coordinator of accreditation and that a foundation be created to raise money to finance the system (which is now largely paid for by institutional dues).

"The nation is in danger of losing the value of an independent higher education system, replacing it instead with a government bureau bent on the three Rs of rules, regulations and reports," Dickeson said. "What is required is a recalibration that balances institutional interests with public interests. Such a balance can best be obtained by strengthening the accreditation recognition system, preserving the values that matter, and doing so through a thoughtful but aggressive initiative that charters independent accreditation coordination as a national value."

Audience members were intrigued by Dickeson's idea but had numerous questions, many of them skeptical. Michael B. Goldstein, a Washington higher education lawyer, described the prospect of a Congressional charter as a double-edged sword, since "one thing we've all learned ... is the capacity of Congress to end up doing and saying things that none of us intended it to have it do." A Congressional charter would give lawmakers the ability to change that charter to reflect the whims of the moment, arguably giving Congress more direct say over accreditation than it has now, Goldstein said.

Some also questioned the likelihood that the federal government, having shown increased willingness to regulate higher education and increased impatience with colleges for ratcheting up tuition, would be willing to relinquish to a newly chartered CHEA the power to recognize accrediting agencies -- recognition that in turn bestows on colleges accredited by those agencies the stamp of approval to award federal financial aid. Is there any chance that Congress would cede that authority to a higher education entity? Dickeson was asked.

"Somebody needs to assert the authority of higher education quality," Dickeson answered. "If not this group, who?"

— Doug Lederman

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Comments on Whither Accreditation?

Successful assessment and accreditation processes
Posted by Linda Adler-Kassner , Professor/Writing Program Director at Eastern Michigan University on January 28, 2009 at 8:20am EST
As CHEA and other accreditors consider possible changes to the system, I hope they will pay attention the work that disciplines and organizations have done to define and illustrate "good assessment."
Organizations in my discipline of composition and rhetoric (e.g., the Conference on College Composition and Communication; the National Council of Teachers of English; and the Council of Writing Program Administrators) have outlined principles of good assessment and illustrated, with specific examples, how they have been used to improve student learning. AAC&U's VALUE project is another cross-field project attempting to do the same. The two projects outlined at the AAC&U conference last week seem to be additional, promising, efforts.
Accrediting agencies have been important forces shaping how assessment is conceptualized and implemented on campuses nationwide. As their constituents, the examples we can provide might be helpful for them as they consider revisions to their processes.

CHEA --- super-agency
Posted by Glen S. McGhee , Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project on January 28, 2009 at 10:55am EST
Beyond doubt, the higher ed community must take the initiative if it wishes to retain control of its current system of self-regulation and quality control.
Failing to move beyond the 'circle the wagons' response to the Spellings Commission will only increase external pressures for reform, which once initiated, will have catastrophic effects that ripple across the entire sector.
But the obstacles to needed change and innovation are formidable, including the single-pointed focus on student learning outcomes.
As stated in Robert C. Dickeson's position paper, the one-hundred year old system of accreditation is rife with conflicts of interest and lacks transparency.
But Dickeson's suggestions were already made almost 40 years ago, as part of the two-volume Puffer Report (July 1970).
The Puffer Report offered substantive suggestions for the reform of accreditation, including breaking up the massive regional accrediting guilds into smaller organizations, so that they could focus more on their quality control problems, and less on their public relations.
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 also 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.
A national set of standards was recommended 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).
This new organizational form was to have more closely resembled 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. Its proposals were simply ignored.
While the idea to transform CHEA into a super-agency has its appeal, it would face insurmountable internal pressures, those same pressures that eventually forced the collapse of its predecessor body, COPA in 1993 after the landmark reforms of HEA 1992. These reforms, it must be remembered, included required agency standards for student learning, as well as a handful of other standards (see link).
It would be foolish, then, to proceed as Ikenberry suggests, by ignoring these other standards. The need for reform will also need to address these, including the inherent conflict of interest and transparency problems.

Peer Review?
Posted by mythbuster on January 28, 2009 at 1:30pm EST
Given the ever-growing diversity of higher education missions and types, the entire concept of peer review has to be revisited. Is a proprietary school really a peer of a national private liberal arts college simply because they are in the same region? That's not a value judgement of either type of institution but defining accreditation regionally is nonsensical. The agencies should each be broken up into multiple commissions based on institutional characteristics to allow true peer review to take place.

A view from the trenches
Posted by Alan Cheville , Assoc. Professor Elec. Eng. at Oklahoma State University on January 28, 2009 at 2:15pm EST
I'd like to provide a view from "the trenches" of assessment. I teach engineering at a large, public research university and am engaged in several assessment efforts on my campus which require a significant amount of time. As I read this article I found myself agreeing with Robert C. Dickeson that universities are unable to police themselves effectively. There are simply too many conflicting interests at most schools and too many reasons to "excuse" poor performance. Since the spectre of Federal oversight is, in fact, chilling I'd like to offer a few ideas that might enable universities to better guide their own destiny.
First, do not schedule accreditation visits years in advance. Too much accreditation work is crammed into a short span of time just before the visit. Random periodic checks would encourage universities to truly engage in the continual monitoring that good assessment practices require. Random checks would also eliminate the thankless burden of writing an enormous report every couple of years and free up this time to actually assess learning.
Second, recognize that reward structures at many universities actively discourage faculty participation in significant educational improvement efforts. In my (admittedly limited) experience a core group of faculty shoulders most of the assessment burden in addition to their other duties. We are part-time or temporary employees when it comes to assessment. Creating rewards and training opportunities for these faculty would facilitate improved assessment. Rather than mandating federal standards, create a central repository of "approved" practices that can be locally adopted. Providing the required cost and time of each would enable us to do our jobs better. Such efforts already exist, but often the word doesn't get out very well.
Third, recognize the gargantuan effort required for every university to accurately monitor all its own learning outcomes. Rather than building complete assessment expertise at each university a more distributed approach could be used. One method would be to set up regional consortia of universities with each member specializing in specific assessment measures. For example University A might specialize in rubric-based evaluation of student writing and annually collect artifacts from peer schools to assess. Meanwhile University B would evaluate math artifacts from all universities in the consortium. Such an approach would free up faculty time, allow development of depth in those who participate in assessment, and offer more insightful comparisons with peer schools.
Finally, there needs to be some measure in place to ensure that internal resources are allocated to education if universities do not meet meaningful accreditation standards. The Delta Foundation report (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/15/delta) showed that increasing costs for students are not benefiting their education. Rather these funds are going to research and administration. The Federal government can ensure universities take student learning seriously by limiting access to research funding should learning goals not be met. A "carrot and stick" approach could be used to ensure that universities that do improve learning have increased access to funding. This is obviously a controversial (and probably a bad) solution, but some way needs to be found to bring the interests of the researchers and teachers into alignment.

Posted by Dennis Ruhl on January 31, 2009 at 2:35pm EST
In accreditation we are talking about minimally acceptable standards. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of education for 95% of the students who attend schools that will maintain standards with or without an accreditation system.
I don't think anyone wants accreditors to excessively micro-manage schools because it would be non-productive in 95% of cases, just adding non-teaching costs.
As the regional accreditors differ somewhat in their standards, just break down geographic barriers and force them to compete. Let accreditations have different standards and allow schools to seek out a good financial and philosophical match.

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