If Judith S. Eaton came to the Council of Independent Colleges’ Presidents Institute to ring the alarms, mission accomplished. Ms. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, asserted that traditional accreditation faces unprecedented scrutiny in the halls of government and in the news media for the various failures of colleges.
And, she said, what is slowly replacing accreditation should give everyone pause: more federal oversight, increased regulation, and even proposals for government-run college-ratings systems.
While Ms. Eaton and other higher-education officials have tried to push for more independence for accrediting bodies, government officials have more or less responded by proposing alternatives to accreditation—run by the states, or by Congress itself—or doing away with it altogether.
“‘We won’t work through you anymore,’” she said, characterizing the response. “‘We will work around you.’”
“Members of Congress want accreditation to serve as a compliance tool for assuring the quality of higher education,” Ms. Eaton said at the CIC meeting here on Monday. “They don’t see accreditation as a vital and valuable tool for quality improvement.” She said that the forthcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which expires this year, will be “a hugely high-stakes event for accreditation” that will shape its future for years to come. (She speculated, however, that the reauthorization might not actually go through until 2017.)
A ‘Bad Narrative’
Ms. Eaton’s organization, which represents 3,000 colleges and recognizes 60 accrediting organizations in the United States, has been trying to mount a defense of accreditation, but it’s an uphill battle at a time when pundits and policy makers see accreditation as “broken.”
Many people have raised valid concerns about the indebtedness of students, the poor learning outcomes, low graduation rates, and high student-loan default rates among some populations, and the financial instability at many institutions. When a scandal related to these topics pops up at a college, one hears a common refrain: “Where were the accreditors?”
But in her speech, Ms. Eaton insisted that accreditors have taken blame for failures that are out of their control.
Ms. Eaton called on the college presidents in the audience to fix a “bad narrative” in Washington that affects all of higher education. “I may be able to explain why schools with low graduation rates and high student indebtedness or low student-completion rates are accredited, but that is not enough,” she said. “We need to be able to do more and say more. We need to be able to say that we want to raise the bar.”
Ms. Eaton noted that policy makers complain that they can’t get reliable data about student learning outcomes and performance from colleges. When she meets with policy makers, she talks about institutional autonomy, peer review, and academic freedom—hallmarks of the academic enterprise—but gets a dour response. “‘Oh, those are buzz words—you are giving me excuses, lady, and I am not interested,’” Ms. Eaton said she hears. “Yet to us, these are essential. Are we going to be able to keep them?”
Presidents Respond
During a question-and-answer session, some presidents in the audience commiserated. Donald J. Farish, of Roger Williams University, said that colleges had been put in the position of fixing all of society’s ills—such as improving social mobility and economic opportunity—while being at the end of a broken education pipeline.
“Our strength is in our diversity, and our weakness is in our diversity,” he said, “because we cannot present a monolithic approach or response to all of this.”
But Brian Baird, president of Antioch University Seattle, who was a Democratic congressman from Washington for 12 years, pushed back gently. There is some legitimacy to the concerns that policy makers are raising, he said.
“Ask any member of Congress, ‘How well do your staff write?’” he said. “These are staff that have graduated from many of the institutions represented here, which are fully accredited. It is nightmarishly frustrating to hire students from fully accredited institutions who can’t write or think well, and there are lots of them.”
What’s more, Mr. Baird said, there is a serious and valid concern that accreditation, as it’s currently constructed, hampers needed innovation in the academy—the very thing it purports to protect.
He offered a last piece of advice, speaking from his experience in the House of Representatives: “If you approach a policy maker on the assumption that ‘we know best, you don’t,’ you are probably not going to be very successful.”