Nearly two years into the Obama Administration, colleges have not gotten the relief they expected from the contentious battles over measuring quality that defined the Bush Education Department.
Instead, President Obama and Congressional Democrats are pressing even harder in some cases to overhaul the nation’s accreditation system, beginning with demands for tighter oversight of the for-profit education sector.
The Education Department’s inspector general has gone so far as to urge the education secretary to review whether one major accreditor should still be in business, after the agency approved a for-profit university despite concerns about the value of credits it awarded.
Although previous efforts, by the Bush administration and others, have led to few large-scale changes in the system, the growing bipartisan appetite for stricter controls and better oversight makes the current climate ripe for substantial action from the Education Department and accreditors themselves, if not from Congress, too.
Bracing for the prospect of new rules and laws that could expand their responsibilities, accreditors and the institutions they monitor are defending the self-regulation colleges use to ensure academic quality. But they are also responding to the pressures from the White House and Capitol Hill by making some changes on their own, hoping to stanch the possibility of more far-reaching federal requirements.
A New Round of Scrutiny
At the heart of the issue is whether the current system of quality control in higher education is working. Advocates of change say the six regional and seven national accreditors have varying standards that are sometimes too lax, allowing for limited oversight of how credits are awarded, how much learning is accomplished, and what happens to the mission of institutions that change owners.
Their cause has been aided by the recent investigation into the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which came under fire for approving American InterContinental University, an online, for-profit institution. The college was accredited despite the commission’s concerns about the value of credits awarded for some of its courses, a situation that prompted the Education Department’s inspector general to call on the education secretary to review North Central’s status as an accreditor and that resulted in tense Congressional hearings.
At a June hearing examining the Higher Learning Commission, Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat who is chairman of the House education committee, said defining a credit hour is critical to ensure that students and taxpayers, through federal student aid, are not footing the bill for courses that are not worth the amount of credit being awarded.
The accreditation system has survived previous attempts at major overhauls. The recommendations of then-Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, including that accreditors set more-prescriptive standards for colleges to show proof of student achievement, set off a fierce debate, but few made it into law.
When the Democratic-controlled Congress passed legislation in 2008 to renew the Higher Education Act, for instance, it prohibited the Education Department from dictating how colleges measure student learning for purposes of accreditation.
Now the Education Department under President Obama is taking a hard look at accreditors as it formulates rules for carrying out the Higher Education Act. The department has proposed tough new regulations for the fast-growing for-profit sector of higher education, which enrolls less than 10 percent of all college students in 2008-9 but received about 23 percent of the federal student aid dollars, nearly $24-billion, according to a Congressional analysis. One proposed rule would require accreditors to set strict definitions for measuring credit hours and program length.
That rule arose shortly after the department’s inspector general released its letter charging that the Higher Learning Commission had ignored concerns about credit inflation at American InterContinental.
Congress, too, has begun voicing its own concerns about whether accreditors are providing effective oversight and promising further scrutiny.
At the June hearing, Representative Miller said he worried that, without adequate regulation by accreditors, the awarding of credit hours could become a business decision rather than an academic one. His concern, he said, is that for-profit colleges could simply earn more money by awarding a large amount of credit for a shortened program.
Accreditors came in for much tougher treatment at an August hearing of the Senate Education Committee. Senators pressed Michale S. McComis, executive director of the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, about whether the national accrediting group was doing enough to prevent loan defaults and fraudulent recruiting practices at the many for-profit and online colleges that are approved by the organization.
Mr. McComis responded that there is “no correlation between loan-default rates and the quality of education” and that state and federal authorities are better equipped to detect potential fraud than accreditors.
Senators also questioned the independence of accreditors, which are supported by dues from member institutions and governed by representatives of the colleges they accredit.
During that hearing, Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Senate Education Committee, warned that he would return to the issue of accreditation, promising another hearing on the topic. It’s not yet clear if the concern he and other members of Congress have shown will lead them to introduce any legislation that seeks to change how colleges are accredited.
Sen. Michael B. Enzi, the top Republican on the Senate Education Committee, has said he wants Congress to look beyond just problems in the for-profit sector. He said at a hearing last month that he would be “working to lay the groundwork for a broader, thorough, and more fair investigation into higher education” that would ask whether taxpayers are getting an appropriate value for the money they spend on all colleges.
Accreditors Respond
Accreditors and the institutions they monitor are deflecting criticism from the public and lawmakers by explaining that they are not full-fledged federal investigators and that the current controversies have more to do with concerns about how federal money is being used than with the educational quality of institutions.
“We’re in the middle of a very basic philosophical debate about whether our system of voluntary accreditation based on peer review is equal to the task of guaranteeing educational quality, or whether a European-type governmental compliance and auditing function is necessary,” said Craig D. Swenson, chancellor of Argosy University, a for-profit institution, and one of the 18 members of a federally appointed group that will advise Education Secretary Arne Duncan on accreditation matters.
State and federal governments are better equipped to enforce consumer protections for students, say accreditors, who have traditionally focused on preserving academic quality.
“I think that the tone that has come out against accreditors is unjustified,” said Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, one of the nation’s six regional accrediting organizations. The Education Department, she said, has some responsibility for oversight as well.
Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, said the accreditation process is not designed to investigate fraud. “I don’t think people realize, it’s not that we have 100 inspectors who go to colleges and inspect them,” she said.
Instead, the commission has approximately 1,300 volunteers who are experienced in various facets of higher education and trained by the commission to understand and apply the accreditor’s standards, Ms. Manning said. Small groups of two to 16, depending on the size of the college, review an institution’s accreditation materials and visit the campus, she said.
Congress seems to be more interested in the amount of debt that many students are acquiring to attend for-profit institutions than about the academic quality at those colleges, Ms. Wheelan said.
Still, accreditors are making some changes in their practices to respond to some of the concerns being raised in Washington.
Following the Education Department’s inquiry into inflated credit hours at American InterContinental, the Higher Learning Commission has agreed to several changes, recommended by the department, in its process for evaluating institutions, Ms. Manning has said.
The commission, for example, has developed some basic specific measures of an institution’s requirements in six areas, including fiduciary responsibility, public information, programs, and instruction and resources. Before setting those “minimum expectations” the commission had much broader standards for accreditation meant to allow a wide range of practice.
Elsewhere, the Southern association may consider a policy to require all the institutions it accredits to accept transfer credits from any other college approved by the organization, Ms. Wheelan said. That groundbreaking concept is still in its infancy and would have to be considered by the commission’s governing board, Ms. Wheelan said.
Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which represents about 3,000 colleges, said that over the past several years accrediting organizations have responded to the growing calls for accountability and transparency from the public and lawmakers. The groups, she said, have worked to better identify and judge student achievement and share more information about what they do and how well the institutions are performing.
Many higher-education officials also worry about what will be lost if accreditation becomes too rigid and begins to transform from a system of self-regulation and peer review to an adversarial process more akin to consumer protection.
“People wanting us to impose more uniform structures and rules runs counter to the diversity in higher education,” said Paul C. Pribbenow, president of Augsburg College, who has served on several teams reviewing other institutions for the Higher Learning Commission, which also accredits his college.
“I hope we can continue to have the best of the peer-review process, because we can bring the expertise to the table that we’re never going to get from a federal entity,” he said.
Need for Improvement
The basic question is whether a system of accreditation developed in the 19th and 20th centuries meets the needs of a 21st-century higher-education landscape, in which many more students are being encouraged to go to college and some institutions are owned by publicly traded corporations that must please shareholders as well as students.
The significance of accrediting groups grew along with enrollment in the nation’s colleges. The turning point came when the 1965 Higher Education Act required an institution to be accredited by a federally recognized accreditor for its students to receive federal financial aid.
Peter T. Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, said the debate boils down to whether accreditors should serve primarily as consumer protectors or continue their traditional role of monitoring academic quality more broadly.
It’s time for a “fundamental reappraisal of accreditation,” Mr. Ewell said. He said all the regional associations should adopt a common set of standards to use when assessing colleges’ quality to reassure the public that there is consistency in their approaches.
Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability & Productivity and a member of the Spellings Commission, would also like to see fundamental changes in accreditation that focus on traditional nonprofit colleges as well as the proprietary institutions. For example, accreditors could provide a sort of dashboard of indicators of college performance on retention and graduation rates, as well as the salaries of their graduates, he said.
“We should be moving to more of a Consumer Reports for colleges, to provide the public with information that the college rankings do imperfectly,” he said.
The actual changes in accreditation may not end up going that far, but in a discipline that stresses continuous improvement, accreditation will have to evolve to meet not only government’s expectations but also the changing college market, said Mr. Swenson, of Argosy University.
If it hopes to survive, he said, “the accrediting community will have to demonstrate that it can expand and deepen its oversight of an increasingly diverse set of institutions.”
