Leaders of accrediting organizations and colleges have often worried aloud that if they are not able to change the nation’s system of accreditation, then Congress or the U.S. Department of Education will change it for them.
But a report issued on Thursday by a panel of college presidents and leaders of accrediting organizations, convened by the American Council on Education, offers evidence of how hard it will be to find agreement on what those changes should be. The group comprised more than two dozen members, including representatives of the nation’s six regional accreditors, presidents of two-year and four-year colleges, both for-profit and nonprofit, and organizations that study or advocate for accreditation.
The report lays out the challenges facing the American system of ensuring academic quality and presents six broad principles on which members of the group found common ground.
The recommendations include increasing the transparency of accreditation and stressing the importance of requiring evidence that student are learning. Accreditors should take “prompt, strong, and public action” against substandard institutions and make accreditation more cost-effective, the panel concluded. In addition, accreditors should develop a process that provides for the expedited review of elite institutions that are clearly qualified for accreditation, the report says.
The report’s conclusions largely echo ideas that have been widely discussed in recent years as accreditation has come under scrutiny from Congress, the Education Department, and state governments, mostly over alleged abuses by for-profit colleges.
Edward L. Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and the panel’s chairman, said the broad nature of the recommendations reflects the difficulty college presidents and accreditors found in reaching consensus on meeting the public’s growing demand for accountability.
Despite frequent and strong disagreements, the conversations between the college presidents and the leaders of the accrediting organizations were civil, Mr. Ayers said. But as a result, the report focuses on bedrock principles that all sides found acceptable, rather than providing specific policy recommendations.
The largest area of disagreement concerned how institutions should show evidence of student achievement, Mr. Ayers said.
While accreditors have been emphasizing the need for measures of learning for several years, some institutions have resisted using standardized gauges, such as graduation rates, saying such figures would not accurately reflect their mission or accomplishments.
“Institutions are resisting being put into a box,” Mr. Ayers said.
The real value of the report is that it will be a document both accreditors and college leaders can use to motivate their constituencies on change, he said. “This is a challenge to ourselves,” he said, “rather than a defense.”
