Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed
In an interview for Inside Higher Ed’s podcast The Key, I asked Maria Toyoda, CEO of the WASC Senior College and University Commission, which part of the Education Department’s proposed changes to accreditation would be most disruptive. I didn’t get the straightforward answer I expected. She didn’t say, for example, policing research integrity or the end of peer review. Instead, Toyoda responded with how the 80 pages of proposed rules, published last month, could change the very nature of accreditation in this country—and perhaps not in the way the department would like.
The Higher Education Act, first passed in 1965, lays out the three-part system of higher ed oversight: the federal government, state agencies and accreditors, she told me. The government and accreditors have clear, independent roles. Toyoda described it as a dichotomy baked into the law itself. “You’ve got substance and you’ve got process,” she said. “And where the federal government lands is, they can tell us about what should be in our processes.” Under the law, the government can regulate whether accreditors have standards and how they’re applied, but not what those standards are. Yet, “What you’re seeing in [the new rules] is it looks like something that they are prescribing us to do,” Toyoda said. “They are then coming right up to that line that could be crossed from being a process to being something of substance.”
One place she thinks that line could be crossed? The proposed protections for academic freedom and the First Amendment. The proposal doesn’t go as far as defining academic freedom, but the department says accrediting agencies would need to evaluate if any institutional policies protect civil rights and First Amendment rights, and whether those policies include academic freedom protections “that are clearly articulated and applied consistently to faculty regardless of appointment classification, race or other immutable characteristics, viewpoint, or ideology.” The department also said it would like agencies to “require” that an institution’s policies include freedom-of-inquiry protections.
Currently, “All of us review things like academic freedom,” Toyoda said of accrediting bodies. But “we’re not telling institutions what their academic freedom policies are. We’re asking them, do you have a policy and are you following that policy and are you following it consistently? We’re not prescribing to them what that language must say.”
Not only does the department’s overhaul potentially violate the Higher Education Act, “there could be a very significant shift in terms of this relationship that institutions have with their accreditors,” Toyoda said.
Going further, she argued that requiring accreditors to apply rigid rules to all institutions is not only unrealistic—it could stifle innovation. “None of us, I think, disagree with that basic philosophy around accountability,” she said. “The thing is that you can never write a rule that prescribes exactly how you’re going to get from point A to point B without it applying uniformly to all kinds of institutions.” For example, assessing a small private liberal arts institution by the same rule as a large public research university is “impractical” and “undermines what I would view as the genius of higher education in the U.S., which is to try different things,” she said.
But supporting innovation is exactly what the department says these new regulations are meant to do. Cutting red tape around new accreditor recognition is part of that goal. Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent has said that with more accreditors, the market will be more dynamic and agencies would be incentivized to differentiate themselves. Toyoda said she agrees that more institutional accreditors will bring healthy competition, but she questions that logic for programmatic accreditors, who could “water down” their standards.
Toyoda isn’t the only one who agrees, at least in theory, that competition is a good thing. In its public comment on the proposed rules, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education also supported more competition and easing the process to switch accreditors. But it encouraged the department to ensure the rules provide an appropriate level of flexibility for accreditors and their practices. “We celebrate that institutions have choices when it comes to accreditation; however, accreditors must also be permitted to have different policies and procedures that make us uniquely attractive to institutions,” MSCHE President Heather Perfetti wrote.
Toyoda is less certain that institutions will accreditor-hop the way the department hopes. The rules might streamline the process for switching, but colleges will be burdened by what comes after, she said.
“You have to learn all these new standards and you have to apply all these standards in the way that the accreditor is seeking to have you apply them. For most institutions, this means starting from scratch with a self-study that is written up against these new standards and the ways in which the new accreditor is seeking evidentiary guidance and all of that kind of stuff,” she said. “Switching itself is easy. It’s what comes after that’s going to be complicated for institutions.”
A July survey of more than 320 institutional leaders by the American Council on Education backs her up: Only 5 percent said their institution was likely to change agencies if the rules are adopted. And in Inside Higher Ed’s forthcoming annual survey of chief academic officers, out next week, just 17 percent predict the planned federal accreditation overhaul will have a somewhat or strongly positive impact on higher education.
Toyoda framed the department’s proposals within the context of the three-way balance of power in higher ed oversight. By being too prescriptive in its new regulations, the federal government risks encroaching on accreditors’ independence, which could undermine its aims. The government says it wants more innovation, more competition among accreditors and more intellectual diversity. But without sector support, it might not achieve any of those.
