Two decades ago, some of higher education’s most-prominent leaders waged war against specialized accreditation.
Robert H. Atwell, who was president of the American Council on Education, believed that accreditors that assessed the quality of programs in particular disciplines were more trouble than they were worth: They sapped administrators’ energy with fees, site visits, and long lists of requirements that did little to improve the quality of education. (He made exceptions for fields that trained students to save lives.) When he served on the board of the Council on Postsecondary Accreditation, he voted against virtually every specialized accreditor that applied for membership. John V. Lombardi, who was president of the University of Florida, told The New York Times in 1998 that specialized accreditors “blackmail” college presidents by demanding unwarranted resources.
For better or worse, the mood has changed. Specialized accreditors are proliferating. The Association of Specialized and Professional Accreditors has 61 members, up from 46 a decade ago. Some provosts say they would like their programs to apply for as many specialized accreditations as they can, even though the fees for an initial accreditation can run past $25,000.
Several forces have driven that shift. Some specialized accreditors—including ABET, which accredits programs in engineering and other technical fields—have developed strong reputations for improving teaching and curriculum. As institutional accreditors have stepped up pressure to assess students’ learning, faculty members often say they would rather go through that process with a specialized accreditor that has expertise in a single academic discipline than deal with a random committee from a regional accreditor.
Meanwhile, in medical and counseling fields, specialized accreditors have increasingly persuaded state lawmakers to require that people attend accredited programs before they may take licensure exams.
But amid this boom time for specialized accreditors, there are still widespread disagreements about exactly what their responsibilities to the public are.
This year, for example, a heated battle has developed about how much accreditors should disclose about their decisions. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for self-regulation of higher education, has rolled out a new rule that will require the accreditors it formally recognizes to publicly explain the reasons for any adverse actions they take against programs, even for rejecting a program’s initial application. The rule has angered some accreditors, and three prominent ones—in nursing, dietetics, and the arts—chose to walk away from the council’s recognition system this spring. But other scholars have praised the new policy, and approximately 10 programmatic accreditors are seeking first-time recognition by the council.
Underlying the debate are broader questions about the purposes of accreditation. Do programmatic accreditors exist to single out the weakest programs in their field—that is, to tell the public that accredited programs have met a minimum bar and are not scams or marginal operations? Or, by contrast, is programmatic accreditation a gold seal for a small number of programs that are especially strong? Or is it a broad assurance that programs are “engaged in a process of continuous improvement,” however high or low their general quality might be?
Ask three specialized accreditors that question, and you’re likely to get three different answers. That makes it difficult for prospective students and the public to interpret the lone piece of information that they get from most programmatic accreditors: A program is accredited or it isn’t.
Joseph Vibert, executive director of the specialized-accreditors association, speaks thoughtfully and fluently about many elements of higher-education policy. But when the conversation moves toward questions of transparency, he pauses and spends 10 or 15 seconds collecting his words. “I have 60 members,” he says, “and they have very, very diverse opinions about this.”
Transparency Blues
For a glimpse of the debates over disclosure, imagine that you’re looking for a career as a respiratory therapist.
If so, the Web site of that field’s programmatic accreditor might serve you well. Beginning in August, the Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care will publish extensive data about students’ fates at each of the 476 programs it accredits. What proportion of students graduate? How many pass the national licensure test? How many find jobs in their chosen field?
But suppose you’d rather be a chef. The Web site of the American Culinary Federation, which accredits programs at 203 American colleges and universities, might leave you shaking your head. That site reveals nothing about outcomes, a question on the minds of many prospective students who wonder if the cooking boom has become a bubble. Among the programs accredited by the federation are the California Culinary Academy, a for-profit college that recently reached a tentative $40-million legal settlement with former students who claimed they were fraudulently led to expect much higher post-graduation wages than they actually found, and the culinary program at Baltimore International College, whose institutional accreditation was revoked in June by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
And student outcomes aren’t the only absent piece of data. The culinary federation’s site does not indicate when programs’ accreditations are scheduled for renewal, and it does not reveal cases in which accreditations have been withdrawn or placed on probation. The site does not even include the official accreditation standards, although interested parties can receive them upon request.
To grasp why the two accreditors have such divergent attitudes toward public disclosure, it helps to understand the very different kinds of leverage that they have over their accredited units.
In 49 states, people cannot become licensed respiratory therapists unless they have graduated from a program accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care (some states’ laws name the commission’s now-defunct ancestors, but the effect is the same). The accreditor would like to maintain that monopoly, so it has an interest in assuring state legislatures that it maintains high standards. Fledgling respiratory-care programs have no choice but to play ball with the accreditor.
“Our system has been based on student outcomes since the late 1980s,” says Thomas R. Smalling, executive director of the commission. “We have thresholds that programs are required to meet in terms of attrition, job placement, employer satisfaction, and credentialing success.”
Culinary-arts programs, by contrast, operate in a field where graduates are rarely asked to take licensure tests (with the small exception of food-safety certifications). No state laws dictate that chefs must have graduated from an accredited program—thankfully so, most people would say, since many of the world’s best cooks never trained in a college setting.
In such nonlicensed fields, department chairs face a complex calculus when they decide whether to pursue specialized accreditation. They might seek it because they want to join a national conversation about how to improve their field. Or they might have less virtuous reasons, such as a desire to use accreditation standards to win more resources from their provosts. Whatever their motives, these program leaders always have the option of walking away from specialized accreditation if their accreditors make uncomfortable demands.
“It’s very rare for us to suspend a program’s accreditation,” says Robert Hudson, who directs the culinary-arts program at Pikes Peak Community College, in Colorado, and chairs the culinary federation’s accrediting commission. “We try to work with programs to prevent problems before they develop.” Even in the rare cases when suspensions occur, he argues, there is no reason to spell out the gory details in public.
Inside the Black Box
But that is exactly what Mr. Hudson’s agency will be expected to do beginning in 2014, when its recognition by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation is scheduled to be renewed. Under a policy that officially began last month, accreditors recognized by the council must inform the public of their reasons for denying or withdrawing accreditation, and they must also distribute official replies from the programs whose accreditation has been affected.
The rule did not take effect all at once, but will kick in as each accreditor comes up for “re-recognition.” More than two dozen programmatic accreditors will go through that process between now and the end of 2012.
The national council’s blessing matters a great deal to institutional accreditors, because eight states insist that colleges be accredited by a group recognized by the council. For specialized accreditors the stakes are lower, but council recognition is generally perceived as a sign of quality. And specialized accreditors that approve overseas programs often use the council’s recognition to assure foreign governments that they are legitimate accrediting agencies.
The new disclosure rule is a big mistake, says Ulric K. Chung, senior director of the Commission on Accreditation for Dietetics Education. When its recognition came up for renewal by the council this year, it chose not to apply.
“Accreditation has historically been a confidential process,” Mr. Chung says. “We want to give programs the benefit of the doubt. If we’re forced to publicly disclose problems before there has been a chance to resolve them, that might make programs less likely to be honest with us. Our role is to help programs improve, not to be a watchdog.”
The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education and a consortium that accredits programs in art, music, dance, and theater also chose not to pursue re-recognition this year.
“They were not happy with the revisions in our policy,” says the council’s president, Judith S. Eaton. But she is unapologetic. “We expect accreditors to give the public some basic information about the basis for their final decisions. With some people, this aroused enormous consternation.”
She notes, however, that roughly 10 accreditors, including Mr. Smalling’s respiratory-care accreditor, are seeking first-time recognition from the council. She does not expect a net decline in the number of accreditors recognized by her organization.
Mr. Chung, of the dietetics accreditor, speculates that the council is becoming more aggressive in an attempt to forestall a radical change in federal accreditation policy when the Higher Education Act is renewed. “But if CHEA is going to act like the U.S. Department of Education, we’d rather just deal with the department directly,” he says.
Maintaining recognition through the Department of Education, but not through the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, was an attractive option for Mr. Chung’s agency. But specialized accreditors that do not act as gatekeepers for Title IV money and are therefore ineligible for federal recognition may be more inclined to make peace with the council’s new rules.
The Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs, for example, began late last year to publish extremely detailed information about its accreditation decisions. “I’m not sure that we’re fully in compliance yet,” says Douglas G. Viehland, the business accreditor’s executive director. “But we’re moving quickly in that direction.”
Very Good, or Not Bad?
Randall S. Upchurch, a professor of hospitality leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, has led his program’s effort to win accreditation from the Accrediting Commission for Programs in Hospitality Administration, a Maryland-based agency that operates on a shoestring budget, with just two part-time staff members. Stout expects to hear a verdict from the accreditor this month.
Accreditation would give his program due recognition for efforts it has made to improve its curriculum, Mr. Upchurch says. “When I talk to prospective students and parents, they’re very interested in accreditation.”
But what exactly will those prospective students gain if Stout’s program wins this accreditation? The commission’s standards are overwhelmingly about inputs: Does the program have sufficient financial support and a large enough faculty? Does it have “a carefully constructed, functioning, and monitored plan for the continued maintenance, replacement, modernization, and support of laboratory equipment”?
When it comes to student outcomes, however, the standards give programs a great deal of discretion to define their own goals. And unlike in, say, respiratory care, there is no national licensing test with results that can be compared across programs.
In other words, the standards seem designed to assure that programs simply are not bad—that they have met a baseline threshold. Its mission statement says as much: The first principle is to assure that hospitality-administration programs are “of acceptable quality.”
Dorothy C. Fenwick, the commission’s executive director, defends that mission. “We serve middle-tier programs,” she says, noting that the country’s most prestigious hospitality programs, including Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, have never sought accreditation from her group.
For programs that lack Cornell’s renown, she says, accreditation can help build reputations and prestige. And even though her group’s standards do not include many explicit learning outcomes, she insists (and Mr. Upchurch agrees) that accreditation brings programs into a national conversation about how to improve instruction.
In any case, there is no sign that specialized accreditation is dying. Even at a time of tight budgets, many provosts say they would like as many specialized accreditations as they can get—in part because their regional accreditors like to see those badges.
“We often accept information compiled for specialized-accreditation reports as documentation for meeting our standards,” says Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. “From that standpoint, there’s an intimate connection between what specialized accreditors require and what we require of entire institutions.”
At Mississippi State University, Jerry Gilbert, the provost, says that all 91 of the institution’s programs that are eligible for specialized accreditation have it. “We see it as the best way to guarantee that we’re within accepted practice within the disciplines,” he says.
Mississippi State spends $300,000 to $500,000 annually on specialized and regional accreditation activities, Mr. Gilbert estimates. If that’s blackmail, he suggests, it’s well worth paying.
