What the Public Wants From Accreditation

Accreditation is at a pivotal point, facing growing scrutiny from Congress and the public about its effectiveness in assuring quality and its relevance in an era when new models of higher education are beginning to emerge.

In recent weeks, lawmakers have questioned whether accrediting bodies have the ability — and the will — to regulate colleges found to have misrepresented their job-placement rates, and at least one newspaper investigation has challenged the “watchdog” value of a system that allows colleges to remain accredited even though many of their students fail to graduate and default on their student loans.

Coming changes in the federal law governing higher education are also likely to include some shifts in the accreditation process.

Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, an organization of accreditors and institutions, sits at the center of those debates. The Chronicle spoke with her on Thursday about the challenges facing the accreditation system. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Q. Accreditation has been taking a bit of a beating lately. Where do you see the big issues facing accreditation right now?

A. The biggest single issue is the call for accreditation to speak more explicitly to the performance of a college or a university — students graduating, students completing other educational goals, they’re successfully transferring, they get jobs. People want a tighter connection between performance of a college or a university, described in those terms, and whether or not a university is accredited.

Q. Is that new for accreditation?

A. No, it is not new, but it has become more intense and more focused. And I think it’s part of the broader conversation about the importance of some kind of postsecondary education, about tuition, about student debt, about default. That’s what’s putting all this pressure on this scrutiny right now, and what’s ramping up its perceived importance.

Q. Historically, accreditation has been about a process of self-improvement for the colleges, and also some level of this accountability that you’ve just discussed. For the accountability piece, does that mean accreditors are going to be asked to enforce some sort of minimum standards for acceptable graduation rates, acceptable default rates? And if that’s the case, who sets those bars?

A. There is discussion that there ought to be minimum acceptable levels of performance. Whether that actually happens or not for institutional accreditors is not clear. I know there’s more discussion about performance among the regional accreditors. Of course, the accreditors in the for-profit sector already have some performance levels like job placement, like gainful employment, now.

Many of the programmatic accreditors already have explicit cutoffs in the form of licensure pass rates, whether or not they meet state requirements for employment in a particular field. The federal government could develop these expected levels, or these minimum performance levels, or floor, or bright lines — those are all the words that are used. It could emerge — I stress the “could” — in the Higher Education Act.

Alternatively there is some discussion — I don’t know where it could go, and it’s not definitive at this point — among accreditors about, How do we say more about the performance of a college or a university?

Q. Are accreditors themselves comfortable with setting these minimum bars?

A. Historically, no. But I think there is a significant awareness now that the kind of accountability that is being demanded right now takes us to a point where we must be more explicit about performance in some way. One way that the academic and accreditation community could do this is to have institutionally based indicators established. That, I think, would certainly be preferable to many people than having national or federal indicators.

Q. In public discussions about accreditation, there are often concerns that it is a little too self-reverential. Some people go so far as to call it a cartel and question whether it has inherent conflicts of interest because its members review fellow members. What could accreditors do to answer some of those concerns?

A. Accreditors can make clearer — they already do this, it’s publicly available information — the protections they have put in place to avoid conflicts of interest. I know we in accreditation talk about the value of peer review all of the time. But at the same time we could say more about how we protect against peer review going awry when everybody’s got safeguards such as conflict-of-interest policies that are used. You have to have them, and you have to implement them.

The other thing that you can do — and I think we’re seeing more and more of this — is bringing in more public members to serve on accreditation teams. There are already public members serving on all the accrediting commissions, the decision-making bodies. And we’re seeing the beginning of more and more international colleagues on accrediting teams as well. So if we keep the academic core of the peer-review team, but we continue to diversify it with more public members and more colleagues from other countries or other parts of the United States, or other regions in regional accreditation, and this happens frequently, I think that can help as well.

Q. We’re seeing new kinds of organizations entering the educational market and even some discussion about ways to make some of them eligible for federal student aid. What’s the role for accreditation as these new entities start to play a bigger and bigger part in the higher-education ecosystem?

A. This is a sector [of non-degree-granting organizations] that’s going to continue to grow, whether it’s courses or modules or boot camps, you name it. The issue is going to be — if we’ve got, for example, down the road millions of students enrolled in these kinds of educational experiences — what is the quality?

If I’m right about that, the issue is going to be what kind of quality review, and who is going to do that? It needs to be, I would argue, external. An accrediting organization might say, “We want to do that,” and develop a capacity to examine these kinds of innovative providers.

Or the accrediting community could say, “Look, this is really important. In the future, we need to have some kind of capacity, but maybe we want to work with some others to create some new kinds of quality-review bodies that are going to work on this particular new sector, and we’ll cooperate with one another.”

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.