Forget Accreditation. Bring On the College Audit.

Audits are nothing new for companies, or for colleges, either, for that matter. But can the same techniques now commonly used to assure investors, donors, and governments about spending practices also provide meaningful guarantees about the quality of the education a college is providing?

Accrediting agencies are increasingly under fire for what their critics contend is weak or misguided oversight — and reformers and even members of Congress argue that the changing educational landscape demands a more innovative and results-oriented way to ensure that educational programs deliver on their promises. Against that backdrop, the push for an audit-style approach to educational outcomes is gaining steam, much in the way companies like Ben & Jerry’s and HP have used independent assurance bodies to validate their records in such areas as sustainability and human rights.

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As higher ed as a whole becomes more focused on results, the audit approach becomes more appealing, says Rick O’Donnell. a former education commissioner in Colorado and a current member of a federal panel that oversees accrediting bodies. He’s also the founder of a company called Skills Fund, which itself evaluates coding “boot camps” — private schools that teach software and other skills in intensive short-term programs — and makes loans to students in programs that have passed the Skills Fund vetting.

Indeed, it has been actions by the boot camps, those upstarts on the educational scene, that have helped spark the new thinking. One of them is General Assembly, which this year made public a set of standards, developed by an auditor, by which it would measure itself on its educational results. Initially, General Assembly chose just two criteria to report on — job-placement and graduation rates — but said it would probably add additional ones. The company also released specific information and definitions about how it planned to measure those outcomes. For example, it described what would count as a job for purposes of calculating the placement rate. It offered the standards to other boot camps as well.

“This is probably not the right metric for a traditional four-year institution,” says Liz Simon, vice president for legal and external affairs at General Assembly. “But the thing that’s relevant is evaluating outputs, not just inputs.” The comment is an allusion to a common criticism of traditional accreditation for relying too heavily on such factors as faculty qualifications or library resources.

General Assembly plans to publish its actual results this month. Meanwhile, the dozens of private companies offering boot camps haven’t agreed upon a set of single definitions. Mr. O’Donnell’s company is working with about 20 of them, to try to develop some common definitions by late autumn.

A number of other groups are also working to bring an audit-oriented model to the fore, as either a replacement or a complement to the existing system of accreditation. And the auditor who helped General Assembly develop its standards, Brendan LeBlanc, is lending his expertise from the corporate sector to at least one of the groups looking to use auditing to measure colleges’ educational performance.

“This space seems ripe,’ says Mr. LeBlanc, a partner at Ernst & Young in Boston. He is the auditor who conducted the first audit on Ben & Jerry’s sustainability record in 2008. In the corporate world, he notes, “nonfinancial assurance” has become more commonplace as companies’ value becomes less tied to their physical assets and more tied to such factors as their reputations for the quality of services they provide.

So just as companies now report on their human-rights records or, say, their marketing toward children, Mr. LeBlanc says it’s logical that learning outcomes could also be described and measured. As with corporate audits, he says, the key is to find criteria that are objective, measurable, relevant, and complete.

But which criteria should be evaluated, and how?

That’s where several of these other groups are beginning to step in.

The one with the most expansive approach is an ad hoc group assembled by a consultancy called Entangled Solutions. For months it has been collecting recommendations from boot camps, colleges, policy makers, and others on the kinds of educational results that a nonfinancial audit might consider, and how it might do so.

For example, a college might claim that its social-science majors develop critical-thinking skills, as demonstrated by the number of alumni who hold jobs requiring those skills. “Critical thinking is a learning claim,” says Paul Freedman, one of the principals at Entangled, who is working on the project. Having a certain proportion of graduates actually doing that work, on the other hand, is an outcome claim. The auditor would then determine if the college had adequately justified its learning claims and the measures it takes to assess those claims. Learning claims wouldn’t have to be job-oriented; a college might also claim that a high proportion of graduates “contribute to society,” as measured by alumni surveys on community engagement. In each such instance, the auditor’s role would be to pass judgment on how the colleges justify and measure their claims of learning.

This approach is new for higher education, but as Mr. Freedman notes, “it’s not something that Ben & Jerry’s did at the beginning, either.” It was only after a lot of other companies also began claiming to be sustainable that the company felt the need to put some facts behind its claims. “Now we’re in the ‘Is any of this true?’ phase for higher-education outcomes claims,” he says.

Entangled Solutions plans to invite reactions from all corners of higher education on its proposal. Its goal is to create an independent, nonprofit organization that would become the caretaker of learning-outcomes standards, much the way that the Financial Accounting Standards Board oversees corporate-accounting standards. The new group would help establish standards that colleges could adopt. Colleges would then be evaluated by auditors or quality-assurance agencies on their educational records, much the way that eight education providers recently chosen for a U.S. Department of Education experiment called Equip will be evaluated by third parties.

The program, named Educational Quality Through Innovative Partnerships, is a forerunner of the auditor model, says Mr. Freedman. “I’m pretty confident output audits will become more of a norm,” he says.

Not that it will be easy. The auditing model depends on having auditable standards, and with something as complex as higher education, that may seem simpler than it really is. “We need to develop more clear indicators,” says Ralph Wolff, a former president of the senior college division of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, a traditional regional accrediting body.

Mr. Wolff’s interest is more than casual. He and another accreditation expert, Peter Ewell, have just co-founded another organization, the Quality Assurance Commons, which has received funding from the Lumina Foundation to research new models of quality oversight for colleges. His goal, he says, is to find approaches that would be more responsive to student concerns such as costs and postgraduate jobs.

Accreditors aren’t doing that now, he says. “The position that accreditors take, that they are not agents of consumer protection, is not viable.”

Mr. Wolff is uncertain whether the audit model is the right one, but he is working with the group that Entangled Solutions has created. In the model that the consultancy imagines, colleges would hire respected third-party organizations, such as major accounting firms, to conduct the quality-assurance reviews.

Other groups looking at the audit model envision a different approach. A proposal recently unveiled by the Center for American Progress, for one, envisions using third-party standard-setters to evaluate matters related to a college’s financial health and to students’ ability to land jobs and repay their loans, among others factors. In this model, the Department of Education itself would act as the auditor. “At the end of the day, this is about the flow of federal money,” so government should have the final word, says Ben Miller, the center’s senior director for postsecondary education.

Such an approach, he says, would bring more accountability than in the current accreditation system, in which accrediting agencies approved by the government create, verify, and enforce the standards that allow colleges to collectively gain access to billions of dollars in federal student aid. “The verifier and the enforcer needs more of a stake in the consequences of its decisions,” he says.

The center’s proposal is not intended to replace accreditation, says Mr. Miller, but to serve as an alternative structure in which new and existing educational providers could gain access to federal student aid. By focusing on educational results rather than the process, the center’s proposal argues, colleges and other educational providers “would be freer to experiment with new ways of teaching and learning.”

Separately, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation has proposed its own results-oriented system, designed to recognize the criteria that are most important to employers. In its model, colleges’ educational results would be assessed not by an auditor but rather against an industry standard, much the way companies in the private sector can now be assured that the goods or services they are buying meet globally recognized industry standards.

The model has existing parallels in education already, in something known as the M List, a certification program run by the nonprofit Manufacturing Institute. The program gives a stamp of approval to schools and colleges whose programs lead to industry-certified credentials. In the chamber foundation’s model, employer-set standards play the role of the auditor.

Jason Tyszko, senior director of policy, education, and work force at the foundation, who is also working with the Entangled Solutions task force, says his group’s approach is like a “cousin” to the audit model. Unlike the Center for American Progress’s proposal, which holds out federal student aid as a carrot, the chamber foundation’s model offers no direct payoff to participating colleges.

But Mr. Tyszko says colleges could find some advantages in being part of a system in which, in exchange for meeting industrywide standards, they receive companies’ endorsements for their programs, and possibly other benefits as well. Some companies might, for example, offer preferential interviewing opportunities to graduates of colleges that decide to demonstrate that their student performance meets standards set by and for employers.

The approaches may differ, but the principles behind the movements to measure educational institutions by their results are the same. Considering the growing momentum behind these varied ideas, they’re not likely to fade away. And while the movement may have started with coding boot camps, Mr. Freedman, who is also an entrepreneur and an investor in education-technology companies, hopes it doesn’t end with them. “For innovation to flourish,” he says, “new ideas and new institutions will need to demonstrate their value.” The key to that is having a results-based model that assures quality, he says. “Without it, your innovation is flying blind.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.