In recent years, Judith S. Eaton has worked behind the scenes, mostly, to persuade the nation’s major regional accreditors to accept rising calls to hold colleges more accountable for their academic outcomes.
This week, however, Ms. Eaton, who is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, delivered a very public message to those groups: Embrace change or be swept away by its tide.
Accreditors ‘have to at least attempt to engage’ with changes outside their comfort zone in order to be ‘effective in serving students and society in the future.’
At the opening session of the council’s annual meeting, bluntly titled “The Future Is Now: Where Is Accreditation?,” Ms. Eaton told attendees that they must consider demands from the public and policy makers to hold low-performing institutions more accountable, using concrete measures of student achievement such as graduation rates, and considering issues of price and student debt.
“We know we are talking about change that is outside of our comfort zone — things that we’ve not done before or are in contrast to what we are used to doing,” she said on Tuesday morning. But people in accreditation “have to at least attempt to engage such change,” she said, in order to be “effective in serving students and society in the future.”
But it’s not clear that accreditors, in particular those that approve a majority of two- and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions, are ready for those changes.
When asked by a panel of journalists on Wednesday if accreditation needed to be improved, few in the audience signaled they agreed that change was coming or necessary.
“In the national buzz and the press, accreditation has gotten a bad name. But it got a bad name by being put in a neighborhood where it never asked to be,” said Dorothy Leland, chancellor of the University of California at Merced, during another panel discussion about whether and how accreditation should respond to negative perceptions.
Calls for a Shake-Up
Calls for change in accreditation have, in fact, become routine in Washington, where the White House, the Education Department, and Congress have routinely blasted accreditors for their inaction against colleges with low graduation rates or institutions accused of fraud or financial mismanagement. The pressure has mounted in recent months with the collapse of the giant for-profit educator Corinthian Colleges Inc. and news articles such as The Wall Street Journal’s examination of how few low-performing colleges are penalized.
President Obama has issued a set of executive actions meant to increase scrutiny on accreditors. And there are efforts by the Education Department to create new accreditation models for individual course providers, such as StraighterLine, which contracts with colleges to offer mostly remedial classes for students at a very low cost.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has even created a draft proposal that calls for giving employers more say in accreditation to ensure that college graduates are properly prepared for the work force. While the measure is unlikely to be adopted, it is another sign of discontent with the current accreditation system.
Ms. Eaton is not the only voice in the accreditation community calling for change. Susan D. Phillips, chairwoman of the federal advisory panel that makes recommendations to the secretary of education on accreditation, said her group was interested in digging deeper into how accreditors assess student performance in their reviews of their member colleges. Such actions could include asking about completion and graduation rates, especially for low-income and minority students, as well as levels of student debt and defaults on student loans, said Ms. Phillips, a former provost of the State University of New York at Albany.
And there were those at the conference who said the Education Department should even set the minimum academic-performance standards for colleges — though such a policy is now specifically barred by federal law.
Jamienne S. Studley, a former deputy under secretary of education, said the data used to measure graduation rates, for example, are not nuanced or complete enough for the department to do a good job of setting those standards. But giving the department the authority to begin a discussion about the standards “would be a positive step,” Ms. Studley said.
Calls for Caution
Many others at the conference, however, urged caution in making more changes in the accreditation process, which has expanded with a growing number of federal regulatory requirements.
Many of the changes now being demanded go far beyond the role and purpose of accreditation, said some of the attendees, and could bring unintended consequences.
Using graduation rates, for example, is a poor way of grading a college’s success, said John Bassett, president of Heritage University, in Washington State. The percentage of students who graduate, Mr. Bassett said, has much more to do with the selectivity of the institution than it does with the quality of instruction.
At an elite college “a graduation rate of less than 95 percent would be unacceptable,” he said, while at an open-access college a graduation rate of 25 percent or higher “would be remarkable.”
There are also serious questions about measuring an accreditor’s effectiveness based on the number of colleges it has stripped of accreditation — an action that typically forces those colleges to close, since accreditation is required for a college’s students to receive federal financial aid.
“We often get criticized because we don’t close down enough institutions,” Mr. Bassett said. But “of how many could we say the community would be better off if this college didn’t exist?”
‘We can’t take the position of, No, not us. … Accreditation has to do a better job of explaining how it’s relevant.’
Many accreditors acknowledged they need change, but are still struggling with how to explain to the public and elected officials that they are looking out for students.
In one session, titled “Protecting Students and the Role of Accreditation,” Michale S. McComis, executive director of the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, said accreditors already do much more than consumer protection under their current processes.
Accreditors get criticized for considering only “inputs,” such as the size of a college’s library, the number of its faculty members, and the adequacy of its finances to meet its mission and goals. All of those things are important in enhancing the student experience and the quality of education, Mr. McComis said, but are rarely acknowledged by elected officials who criticize accreditation.
After the session, Mr. McComis said that doesn’t mean accreditors don’t need to change: “We can’t take the position of, No, not us.”
But the accrediting agencies could also improve their message, he said. “Accreditation has to do a better job of explaining how it’s relevant.”
Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.
