Washington
Martha J. Kanter, the No. 2 official in the U.S. Education Department, took higher-education accrediting organizations to task on Tuesday for being too secretive about how they assess colleges and for using outmoded standards that don't give enough weight to measuring student learning.
"Accreditation isn't transparent enough, it just isn't," Ms. Kanter said here at the annual meeting of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. "And it takes too long."
In her remarks, Ms. Kanter, the under secretary of education, said accreditation was a crucial part of maintaining quality in higher education as the United States strives to attain President Obama's goal of being atop the world by 2020 in terms of the share of its residents with college degrees. The council, an association of about 3,000 accredited colleges and universities, recognizes 59 accrediting organizations; in that sense, it accredits the accreditors.
The organizations that are responsible for assuring quality in higher education must consider whether their processes are really helping institutions improve and whether they are focusing too much on "inputs," such as the amount of time that students spend in class, and too little on what they have learned.
Accreditors and institutions also should be more willing to open up the accrediting process, by making self-studies easily accessible to the public and to other colleges that want to learn best practices, by announcing the teams of peer reviewers that make campus visits for accreditation purposes, and by opening accrediting commission meetings to the public.
"I just think everything we do ought to be open to scrutiny," Ms. Kanter said in an interview after her speech.
Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' Commission on Colleges, said she felt "caught between a rock and a hard place" on the issue of transparency.
Her organization is one of the six major regional accreditors that serve as gatekeepers for federal student aid, since colleges must be accredited for their students to be eligible for federal grants and loans. But her association is also a private membership group that has determined that a certain amount of information should remain out of the public eye, she said.
Making the entire process open could have the unintended consequence of giving an institution a bad reputation even as they are working diligently to correct problems, said Ms. Wheelan.
Comments
1. drj50 - January 26, 2010 at 04:38 pm
Ironic in that the Department of Education has recently chastised (severely) three regional accrediting bodies trying to focus on student learning rather than "'inputs,' such as the amount of time that students spend in class." Perhaps if DOE could get on the same page, schools could as well.
See recent articles on Middle States (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Audit-Criticizes-Middle-Sta/9217/), SACS (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Education-Dept-Criticizes-/8993/), and North Central/Higher Learning Commission (http://chronicle.com/article/Inspector-Generals-Warning/63206/_), and Goldie Blumenstyk's thoughtful analysis (http://chronicle.com/article/News-Analysis-Thinking-Bey/63349/).
2. dnewton137 - January 26, 2010 at 05:50 pm
Good point! I've been part of accredition visiting teams for a number of major universities over the years. Several of them have posted our team's report on their Web sites. I think that has been a useful contribution to the institutional value of the process.
Donald N. Langenberg
Chancellor Emeritus
University System of Maryland
3. dwallac3 - January 27, 2010 at 09:02 am
Transparency makes the institution look better in the long run. Keeping the honest people honest and all.
4. 11180037 - January 27, 2010 at 10:04 am
Transparency has a nice ring to it until you take into account human nature. A self-study is supposed to be a penetrating self critique of the school, which is challenging enough with the understanding that it will not be placed on the front page of the Washington Post; and what school, organization, or individual would risk such scrutiny and potential repercussions by their full truth display of all the facets of an operation, while those less confined by ethical standards would play to the audience. Team Reports would not likely fare much better as most of the accreditation evaluation criteria focus on largely subjective issues and team members will be inclined toward cautiousness in their write-ups knowing they will be subject to broad scrutiny across a spectrum spanning the general public to the profession, including legal hawks. As for Commission meetings being open to the public, we might pause to consider whether jury deliberations would be better served by such an approach and with that perspective in mind it might well be more obvious how chilling the effect of the bright lights would be on the free flowing debate that is needed in that decision-making process. While you are at it, you might ponder whether the C-Span era has really made the expected difference on our legislator's behaviors, beyond playing to the public with evermore partisan posturing. The Department needs to do a better job of evaluating accrediting agencies starting with better training, more consistency, greater rigor, and higher expectations of the staff that conduct those evaluations. For all the talk of "accountability", there is little to show for it beyond the incessant "talk".
5. ctuck622 - January 27, 2010 at 11:12 am
I have filed numerous SACS complaints over the years, to no avail, and a plethora of Deleted-Without-Being-Read e-mails from Wheelan, et al., of SACS. These accrediting organizations are a joke. They take no action against higher ed institutions though clearly confronted with violations. Higher ed institutions have become nothing more than yet another corrupt branch of government in this country, complete with lobbyists, overpaid administrators, and crooked politicians who view them as "golden handshake" retirement homes, repaid for political favors with six-figure, unadvertised administrative positions...and the US Dept. of Ed claims it lacks the "teeth" to do much of anything.
Carol Tucker, MA
Court Reform-NOW
Pro Se Can You Plea
6. reformhigheredu - February 26, 2010 at 02:43 pm
I agree with Carol Tucker, #5, except, Middle States (MSCHE) is a bigger joke. As long as the check clears, they will pass any substandard university. When questions are asked of them, they simply say "Please read our manual to answer your questions...". Just a tactic for avoiding the responsibility of answering tough questions (and no, my questions were nowhere answered in your absurd manual). Government needs to be assertive with some of these lax accreditation agencies. Middle States even passed a university's nursing program despite many years of warnings (all they did was state on their page "we accept the university's letter...blah, blah, blah...". They did this repeatedly for many years. I would never be attended by a nurse who studied at that diploma mill). How many university's fail accreditation? That is a question that needs to be addressed. How can some of these accreditation agencies allow universities to set thier own standards? If a university's goal is for students to count to 10 and recite the alphabet, then I guess they have met their standards and will pass accreditation. Too much corruption abounds, not just at public universities, but especially at private ones (where there is no oversight whatsoever). The commission that accredits these agencies needs to seriously reform higher education and their standards. Disciplinary actions should be imposed on accrediation agencies which set no criteria for standards at all. Lastly, the public has a right to view the reports from these accrediation agencies. Who cares if a university becomes worried? The goal is for them to improve their standards and not become an "accreditted" diploma mill.