‘A Heavy, Heavy Lift’
Last month, Morris Brown College did something that few thought possible: It was reaccredited after 20 years. News of its achievement traveled fast, and many saw it as a symbol of hope for other small historically Black colleges on the brink of closure.
“It wasn’t easy. It was a heavy, heavy lift,” said Kevin James, Morris Brown’s president. “From my understanding, no HBCU has ever come back from a $35-million bankruptcy.”
Accreditation grants colleges access to federal funds. Students who graduate from unaccredited institutions have a more difficult time transferring to accredited institutions or getting their degrees recognized by employers. For HBCUs, which are more likely to serve students in need of federal financial assistance, losing accreditation can be especially disastrous.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges revoked Morris Brown’s accreditation in 2002 due to debt and financial mismanagement. Dolores E. Cross, the college’s former president, and Parvesh Singh, a former financial-aid director, were sentenced to five years of probation for charges related to a financial-aid fraud scheme. And enrollment plummeted from 2,000 to about 80 students.
Morris Brown worked for years with the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools to get its accreditation back. Tracs has received attention as a lifeline for small, private HBCUs that have struggled with accreditation.
The Tracs accreditation process is by no means easier than others, says Timothy Eaton, the president of Tracs. The HBCUs that have received accreditation from Tracs are “the survivors.” According to Eaton, about six to eight institutions a year fail to meet the requirements for Tracs.
To date, Tracs has accredited seven HBCUs. The accreditor prioritizes the restructuring process to get colleges operational, Eaton says. The first thing Tracs advises, after the institution has been free from any adverse action for a year, is to “right size their operations.”
“Some have delusions of grandeur, and they think, ‘We’re going to return with a big splash,’” Eaton says. “The reality is that the institution has been knocked back and is needing to reorganize.”
This could mean having to get rid of a facility that it can no longer support, having to eliminate programs with low enrollment, and having to lay off faculty and staff members.
A Fraught History
In recent years, HBCU advocates have scrutinized accreditation practices as unfair to minority-serving institutions, with a history extending back nearly a century.
When accreditation began in the late 19th century, it was largely voluntary, and accreditors operated privately. It wasn’t until the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 that the accreditors had legal authority to evaluate and approve postsecondary institutions for federal financial aid. Then, in the 1960s, the Higher Education Act greatly increased the legal role of accreditors.
Initially, most accreditation associations excluded HBCUs. Sacscoc brought HBCUs into the accreditation process in 1930. Fisk University was the first HBCU to receive accreditation from Sacscoc, but, according to a report from the United Negro College Fund, few others were granted full membership. This prompted HBCUs to create their own accrediting body in 1934, the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for Negroes, but it was not considered an independent accrediting body and required prospective institutions to have approval from Sacscoc or another regional group. In 1964, the association ceased operations, but not before working with Sacscoc to extend membership to more HBCUs starting in 1956.
More recently, the UNCF report found, HBCU members of Sacscoc were sanctioned at a disproportionately higher rate than other institutions. As of 2018, HBCUs made up less than 10 percent of the association’s 794 members. But in 2017, 33 percent of the institutions sanctioned were HBCUs. The following year, 31 percent of those sanctioned were HBCUs.
The report also highlighted that, in 2017, 30 percent of the accreditor’s special committees — which evaluate institutions on probation or at risk of being put on probation — were assigned to HBCUs. In 2018, 44 percent of special committees were designated to HBCUs.
What’s more, over the past 30 years, 43 percent of all institutions dropped from Sacscoc membership were HBCUs, which UNCF says is disproportionately high, compared to the 9 percent of members that are HBCUs.
The report claims that HBCUs are sanctioned more because Sacscoc uses the same criteria to evaluate “large, wealthy, predominantly white public institutions.” Standing next to those institutions, HBCUs appear to fall short.
“It appears that Sacscoc values a postsecondary system where wealthy institutions, which do not serve low-income students well, are given a pass when they run afoul of the standards, and the institutions that serve large populations of our most vulnerable students are shepherded toward closure,” the report says.
Belle S. Wheelan, the president of Sacscoc takes “great offense” to this. She says that she’s done more in the 17 years she’s been at Sacscoc to be inclusive of HBCUs than her predecessors.
In her first year, the accreditor implemented a small-college initiative where they invited institutions with a full-time enrollment of 2,000 students or fewer, including HBCUs, to get a “more personalized hands-on explanation of our standards and our expectations.”
Wheelan has also tried to make sure that “we have people from the same types of institutions going out on visits.” But it’s difficult, she says, for a couple of reasons. For one, there aren’t many faculty members from HBCUs in their pool of evaluators. While that number has increased since she’s been at Sacscoc, it’s still a small group.
Another challenge: Sacscoc has a conflict-of-interest policy that means if an individual has worked at, graduated from, or has family within the institution being reviewed, they can’t serve on the same committee that’s reviewing it.
“So that limits the number of peers who are available,” Wheelan says.
A Focus on Outcomes
Many HBCUs are denied accreditation because of financial problems, and most of them don’t have large endowments to fall back on, Wheelan says.
In 2018, Sacscoc rescinded the accreditation of Bennett College, a women-only HBCU in Greensboro, N.C., citing financial instability. And despite raising $9.5 million, the college lost its appeal. So, Bennett sued Sacscoc to keep running and sought accreditation from Tracs.
“I think when our faculty and staff first started Tracs accreditation, I would say sort of the understanding of the general public seemed to be, ‘Oh, it must be easy,’” said Suzanne Walsh, Bennett College’s current president. “I sort of dare anyone to say that to our faculty and our staff now that we’ve been through it, because it wasn’t easy. It’s a very thoughtful process.”
While some HBCUs are seeking support from Tracs, other higher-education researchers are asking that the accreditation process focus more on student outcomes.
In a study from Harvard Business School, researchers found that most of the formal oversight activity by accreditors was either supportive of colleges or focused on nonacademic matters including governance, finances, and general compliance. Low graduation rates, high loan-default rates, and low median student earnings did not increase the likelihood that an accreditor would take disciplinary action toward a college.
“That accreditors take almost no action towards colleges for poor academic quality or low student outcomes is concerning,” the researchers Stig Leschly and Yazmin Guzman wrote in the report. “It is an abdication of the powerful legal authority and important role that they have been given by the Higher Education Act and by the U.S. Department of Education to monitor and promote college quality and to help direct public spending on higher education.” —Oyin Adedoyin