Belle S. Wheelan is not someone you would typically associate with the status quo. An African-American woman, she has been breaking down barriers of race and gender for nearly all of her 40-year career in higher education, including as president of Northern Virginia Community College and, later, as Virginia’s secretary of education.
But for the past seven years, Ms. Wheelan has led the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, one of the nation’s six regional accreditors. The organizations have been fixtures of American higher education for more than a century—epitomes of the status quo.
The Southern Association, founded in 1895, accredits more than 800 colleges in 11 states. Few people outside academe have any idea what the process of gaining accreditation involves, but, as Ms. Wheelan puts it, “People know they don’t want to go to a school that doesn’t have it.”
Despite their long history in higher education, accreditors now face what some believe are existential challenges, including technological changes that could transform higher education in ways that diminish the groups’ role as standard-bearers of quality, or even eliminate them as gatekeepers for federal dollars.
The higher-education landscape is shifting rapidly. But accreditation, a lengthy and complex process, is not keeping pace, according to critics, and even some supporters, of the current system.
Accreditors are “perfecting the Pony Express as the telegraph wires are being strung,” Michael B. Goldstein, a higher-education lawyer with the firm Dow Lohnes, told a meeting of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation in January.
While the White House, the Education Department, and many members of Congress are calling for changes, Ms. Wheelan and others closely associated with accreditation argue that the process is still relevant but misunderstood.
As higher education changes, the complex requirements of accreditation draw skeptical questions.
Sitting in her office in this Atlanta suburb, Ms. Wheelan displays her usual frankness, sugar-coated with a slight Southern accent, as she talks about the public and political backlash that lumps accreditation in with all the ills of higher education.
“Quality, from Washington, D.C.'s standpoint, is job placements and loan paybacks,” she says. “That’s not our view of quality.”
The financial model of higher education is broken, but it’s not accreditors’ job to fix that, she argues. The rapid increases in tuition costs at public colleges, in particular, are the result of cuts in state appropriations, she says. “I don’t know what, if anything, I can do to make a college keep its costs down.”
Accreditation is still the most prominent and active watchdog over higher education, Ms. Wheelan declares. “Just because a new idea comes up doesn’t mean we should change everything.”
Talking with Richard A. DeMillo about accreditation is like discussing automotive repair with a guy who is trying to design a hover car.
Mr. DeMillo is director of the Center for 21st Century Universities, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a few miles from Ms. Wheelan’s office. The center is an academic enterprise devoted to studying and promoting “transformative change” in higher education.
His background is quite unlike that of Ms. Wheelan. A white man from northern Minnesota, he has been involved with academe since earning a doctorate in computer science from Georgia Tech, in 1972, he has also worked extensively off campus, including stints with the Department of Defense and Hewlett-Packard.
He has also become an ardent critic of the current accreditation system, which he describes as a barrier to innovation and reform in higher education. Accreditation “is costly, parasitic, self-perpetuating, and prone to abuse,” he wrote in a January commentary for the nonprofit John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. “It is increasingly ineffective and doomed to fail in its primary role of quality assurance.” His essay was titled “Accreditation—or Real Quality Assurance?”
On a sunny October morning, outside a bookstore and coffee shop on Georgia Tech’s campus, Mr. DeMillo explains that the accreditation system is not entirely irrelevant—it’s good, for example, for research universities to have to meet certain benchmarks of quality, such as the qualifications of faculty members and the availability of educational resources in a library or laboratory.
But over all, accreditation is becoming marginalized by the technological upheaval in higher education. “To a lot of people,” he says, “it looks like a speeding train.”
Mr. DeMillo and others at the center are studying ways that students can benefit from the convenience and potential savings of technology and complete their postsecondary education through means nearly or completely outside the traditional campus experience.
For example, students could someday receive all of their instruction from MOOCs, massive open online courses, offered by an unaccredited entity; take a series of assessments or complete some projects to prove their competency; and earn credentials. All of that could take place without any real-world interaction with an instructor or adviser, and without setting foot on a campus, let alone visiting a college library or partaking in any of the other things on which accreditation has some tangible impact.
In fact, competency-based education already exists at accredited institutions such as Western Governors University, and is now being offered by more-traditional institutions, like Southern New Hampshire University. But these approaches could be stretched even further, Mr. DeMillo says.
An even more radical change, he says, would be for traditional colleges to offer nonacademic or student-support services to people who are not enrolled there—a disaggregation of higher education. With more flexibility to use federal financial aid, an engineering student who is not accepted at Georgia Tech, for example, could instead pay à la carte for advising services from the institution and earn his credits from a different source.
While the research to test new models of higher education at the Georgia Tech center is not directly related to accreditation, Mr. DeMillo says it touches on every aspect of what he and his colleagues are exploring.
In addition to promoting research on new educational technology, the center is developing a “higher-education value index” meant to help students choose a college based on possible “return on investment,” he says.
Accreditation focuses heavily on process, he explains, with no ability to analyze what and how much students are learning. But students and employers are thinking more about the skills and outcomes necessary to succeed in the workplace.
“As higher education changes, as technology gives students more options, the value of accreditation moves to the margins,” he says.
Other faculty members at Georgia Tech still find value in accreditation. But getting that value requires navigating a byzantine process that pulls in scores of administrators and professors over the course of two years.
“It’s a huge amount of work,” says Catherine Murray-Rust, Georgia Tech’s vice provost for learning excellence and dean of libraries. She is also responsible for coordinating the university’s next accreditation cycle, which will be completed in 2015.
The effort involves a steering committee of about 40 administrators, who compile a report of several hundred pages detailing how the university is complying with some 95 core requirements of the Southern Association, including those involving federal rules and matters like governance and finance.
A team of 25 reviewers, picked by the accreditor, checks the report. Then another team of reviewers makes a campus visit. That team recommends an action to the board of the commission, which will decide whether to affirm or reject the university’s accreditation status.
For the Southern Association, each institution must also complete a Quality Enhancement Plan, which is meant to improve student learning and must be linked to the university’s strategic plan. The Quality Enhancement Plan represents “the best part” of the accreditation process, says Ms. Murray-Rust, because it focuses on the future and on student learning.
Some colleges trying new models of learning say the regulatory burdens undermine their efforts.
But some institutions trying new models of learning have complained that the regulatory burdens of accreditation and the inconsistency among accrediting agencies undermine their efforts.
In July, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Commission on Colleges and Schools ordered Tiffin University, in Ohio, to sever ties with Altius Education, a $35-million start-up that had created the low-cost, online Ivy Bridge College and served thousands of low-income students trying to earn associate degrees. The accreditor said it was concerned about Ivy Bridge’s academic quality and low student-retention rate. It said the arrangement with Altius was tantamount to Tiffin’s selling its accreditation to an outside party for financial gain.
Altius’s founder, Paul Freedman, blamed most of the company’s troubles on an accrediting mind-set that he said “vigorously enforces the best practices of 30 years ago.”
Also in July, another higher-education start-up, the Minerva Project, announced a partnership with the Keck Graduate Institute, one of seven institutions that make up the Claremont University Consortium, in California.
Ben Nelson, Minerva’s founder, said the regional accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, had encouraged him to seek such a partnership as a means to accreditation—an alternative to the much lengthier and more expensive process of earning approval as a stand-alone institution. The association is reviewing the proposal.
Particularly difficult is the requirement that a college has to graduate a class before becoming fully accredited, Mr. Nelson wrote in an email to The Chronicle. It is hard to recruit high-quality students to an institution that isn’t already accredited, he said.
Mr. DeMillo’s vision of an accreditation-free future is far from a given. (Automobiles have been around for more than a century, and we still don’t have hover cars.) But even if MOOCs and competency-based education aren’t the disruptors that many envision, accreditation faces change.
Paul L. Gaston, who is a trustees professor at Kent State University, says the greatest threat to accreditors “might be in their circling their wagons and defending the status quo.”
“I don’t think that’s a viable option,” says Mr. Gaston, who has served as a peer reviewer for several regional accrediting agencies. His book Higher Education Accreditation: How It’s Changing, Why It Must, has just been published.
Accreditation is more important than ever with the proliferation of online and for-profit institutions, he says. But accreditors have a communication problem. The terms and procedures that different accrediting organizations use are not uniform and are confusing to the public, he says. They also have a hard time explaining the good that they do. “Accreditors have been abysmal at explaining their relevance,” Mr. Gaston says.
Even if accreditors do more to respond to the technological upheaval in higher education, their future may hinge on politics. As Congress debates the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which will expire in 2014, there are proposals from some to decouple accreditation from the requirements for federal student financial aid.
While that major change would simplify accreditors’ jobs, it would also remove their greatest leverage over institutions. The loss of accreditation threatens a college’s financial lifeblood. If accreditation were not required to receive federal student aid, many colleges might conclude that the cost and effort to remain accredited would not be worth it.
Recently, President Obama created a new challenge for accreditors, proposing a ratings system for higher education, which could replace accreditation as a visible way for the public and lawmakers to compare colleges.
Gary D. Rhoades, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, says faculty members across the country are concerned about such a proposal because it could overemphasize simplified outcomes that don’t accurately reflect the value of an institution to its community.
From Ms. Wheelan’s office, her exasperation with recent criticism of accreditation comes through ever so slightly. She says that she understands the intent of Mr. Obama and others to provide more transparency and accountability, but that the politicization of higher education and accreditation has made her jaded.
Repeatedly explaining accreditation procedures and standards seems to have done little to persuade lawmakers, she says: “The more we try to explain it, the more self-serving it sounds.”
She warns that removing accreditors from the regulatory regime would lead to less consumer protection for students, because the Education Department doesn’t have the staff or the resources to monitor all of its own rules.
Most of all, she resents the implication that the whole accreditation process must be blown up to make way for technology and new methods of education. MOOCs are just another form of distance education, Ms. Wheelan says, and online classes have been common for more than a decade. “All the changes, why are these suddenly ‘disruptions’? They used to be called ‘innovations.’”
“I think change is coming, and we are responding to it,” Ms. Wheelan says of the widening demands for accountability and innovations in higher education.
But she acknowledges that critics who see accreditors as slow to respond to rapid changes may have a point: “Nothing happens quickly for us. And that’s part of the problem.”