To the Editor:
My institution, Southern New Hampshire University, was featured in your article about institutions rethinking specialized accreditations such as that by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (“Struggling Colleges Question the Cost and Worth—of Specialized Accreditation, The Chronicle, October 5). The article focused on the expense of pursuing specialized accreditation in the midst of the current economic crisis.
Our situation is a little different. We made the decision not to pursue AACSB accreditation, despite its reputation-enhancing impact, two years ago—well before the economic downturn. We were enjoying record enrollments, healthy budget surpluses, and expanding programs (indeed, in recognition of our improved financial position, Standard & Poor’s upgraded our credit rating this year). So our debate over AACSB accreditation was less about any financial struggle than about other dimensions not fully explored in the article.
As we came to better understand the emphasis and demands of AACSB accreditation, we could not imagine complying with the expectations around faculty credentials (full-time “with advanced research credentials and an active record of ongoing scholarship”), given our very large continuing-education and online programs. Faced with using AACSB criteria for hiring, we worried about finding and keeping faculty members in sufficient numbers for our growing programs.
As one business school dean lamented to me: “I spend all of my time recruiting faculty. I pay them ever-higher salaries for ever-reduced teaching loads, add summer research grants, and have them stolen away from me two years later by someone further up the food chain.” He concluded, “My job is more about staying in compliance with AACSB than it is improving the student experience.”
In many ways, that unhappy dean put his finger on an issue that finally loomed larger than our cost analysis: knowing what we are about. While we support scholarship and research among our full-time faculty members, we see ourselves primarily as a teaching institution. While there are valuable links between research and classroom teaching, a more pronounced shift of resources and hiring expectations would have represented a kind of mission drift for us.
For our students, often first generation and almost all of them receiving financial aid, there is a more relevant set of standards than even those put forward by AACSB. The standards to which we are held have to do with taking students who were often disengaged in high school or who were average performers and lighting a fire under them. They include making up gaps in academic skills and preparation; making sure students are “Day 1" ready for work; aligning our business curriculum with the needs and expectations of employers; keeping pedagogy up to date and effective; and seeing our students gainfully employed soon after graduation.
We have work to do on all of those fronts and that seemed the wiser and more mission-consistent investment of our resources, as much as we might have liked to trumpet the reputation-enhancing endorsement of AACSB. I must add that Jerry Trapnell, AACSB’s chief accreditation officer, was very clear with me about AACSB’s expectations, which he said might not be right for every institution, and he urged me to think about our mission and priorities.
I have two related worries regarding specialized accreditation not touched upon in the article. One is that in almost every case, specialized accreditation is developed and maintained by those in the discipline for the benefit of those in the discipline, and not so much for the institution or its students. While a move to specialized accreditation does not have to result in higher salaries (and greater salary inequities across the institution), reduced teaching loads, and a shift away from teaching to publishing in tenure and promotion deliberations, I have not found any instances in which that has not in fact been the result. Specialized accreditors stake their flag on quality, but it is less clear to me that what they measure and value can be directly linked to improvements in the quality of student experience.
My second worry is that at a time when access, cost, and completion rates loom so large in our national debate on higher education, specialized accreditation adds expensive rungs to the education/career ladder for students and institutions. Does an accounting degree really have to go 150 credit hours from the standard 120 credit hours in an undergraduate degree? Does the physical therapist helping me work through my knee sprain really need a doctorate in physical therapy? Do my marketing students benefit more from someone with a freshly minted Ph.D. and a book on the way or from an M.B.A.-qualified marketing director who is integrating social media into clients’ traditional marketing campaigns every day?
Health care often provides analogies for higher education, and one of the oft-cited drivers of high medical costs in this country is the growing reliance on high-cost specialists delivering expensive new treatments, tests, and therapies as a substitute for a greater emphasis on prevention. The majority of patients need generalists working with them on more fundamental health issues using well-tested and affordable treatments before more serious health issues arise.
I wonder if specialized accreditation and a larger “overreaching” on the part of most institutions does not contribute to an analogous situation in higher education, one in which expensively trained and expensive-to-hire Ph.D.'s teach mostly upper-level courses and do research on increasingly narrow topics (in order to find a publishing niche), when the great majority of American college students need good generalists working with them in more entry-level and gateway courses on the basics. When I asked him what business schools could do better, one recruiter from a large financial-services firm said to me, “I tell all of them the same thing: Just give me students who can think, who can communicate well, who have a great work ethic and integrity. We’ll do the rest.”
That’s a set of standards we can embrace.
Paul J. LeBlanc
President
Southern New Hampshire University
Manchester, N.H.
