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Soon we will have an election, a new President, and a new Secretary of Education. And while we can hope for a more informed and nuanced understanding of higher education from a new administration than we have received from the current one, we also expect a continuation of the calls for accreditors to require increased attention to student achievement and success and greater transparency about results.
At the 35,000-foot level, these expectations are reasonable. However, things are more problematic on the ground. For the past two years, accreditation has been the focus of attention by the current Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, and others who believe that accreditors, in the words of Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education, should “make performance outcomes, including completion rates and student learning, the core of their assessment,” develop frameworks that allow “comparisons among institutions regarding learning outcomes and other performance measures,” and make “the findings of final reviews easily accessible to the public.” Those proposals and the attempt to enforce them through new regulations have been widely viewed as unacceptable by the higher education community.
Anticipating the new administration, now is the time to step back, take a deep breath, review some basic principles, and make recommendations for the future.
The basic argument here is as follows: Regional accreditation is fundamentally sound and should not be harmed by abrupt regulatory changes. At the same time, understanding why accreditation hasn’t met this Secretary’s expectations can be helpful, because accreditation must address increased expectations for transparency, including information about student learning. Further, the federal system of “recognizing” accreditors, while imperfect, serves the public purpose of assuring satisfactory educational quality for purposes of making federal financial aid available to students.
First, Do No Harm
Accreditation—imperfect as it is—serves a valuable function for both institutions and the public. Any change imposed through law or regulation should be weighed against the consequences of harming a fundamentally sound system.
Accreditation serves two functions: institutional quality improvement among its members (the “private” function) and quality assurance (the “public” function). While the quality-improvement role can be traced to accreditation’s beginnings, the quality-assurance role has been explicit only since the 1950s, when the federal government began its system of recognizing accreditors as “reliable authorities concerning the quality of education or training offered by the institutions of higher education ... they accredit” (http://www.ed.gov/admins/finaid/accred/index.html).
The role of accreditors as gatekeepers for federal funds has brought increasing expectations that accreditation serve the public interest by focusing more directly and with greater consequence on educational effectiveness as indicated by student learning and success. It is the quality-assurance function that is under question. But change should not come at the cost of harm to the quality-improvement function.
Moreover, the strength of American higher education is in the diversity of its institutions: large and small; public and private; comprehensive and single-purpose; local, national, and international; religious and secular; non-profit and for-profit; urban and rural; single-sex and coed; military and civilian; HBCUs, Hispanic-serving, and tribal colleges; selective and open-access; all online and all on the ground. American higher education is porous and forgiving, allowing for many second and third acts in American lives. It is market-sensitive, robust, and sufficiently differentiated to encompass world-class research universities and teaching-only institutions. The system supports both institutional competition and cooperation.
While accreditation is not responsible for this diversity, its peer-review system of self-regulation has provided the conditions under which it has flourished and allowed our country’s collection of the best institutions in the world to soar. And while self-regulation is sensitive to differences among members, regulation seeks—and may demand—a consistency which threatens both the diversity and excellence of those institutions and the quality-improvement function of accreditation.
And as a quality-assurance system, accreditation is highly cost effective. Though not designed to hold down costs, by its nature as a system of self-regulation, accreditation relies on small staffs and large pools of active volunteers. In 2005, regional commissions accredited 3,000 institutions using 3,500 volunteers in a system overseen by 105 full-time staff. Quality-assurance systems in most other countries are more regulatory than in the United States and therefore more expensive. It is not unusual for a government-based quality-assurance system to have, on average, one employee for every two or three institutions overseen. The Quality Assurance Authority in the United Kingdom has 130 employees to oversee the quality of 165 institutions. Increasing the regulatory burden placed on accreditation may threaten the peer-review system, which will in turn drive up costs.
Barbara Brittingham is director and president of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education at the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.
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