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[Forums Moderator]

The secretary of education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education is considering a proposal to replace the existing regional accreditation system with a national body. What are the implications? Have regional accreditors outlived their usefulness, now that institutions regularly collaborate across state lines? Does higher education need an accrediting body not controlled by the institutions it monitors? Or would a national accrediting system be more vulnerable to political maneuvering? Would it undermine the diversity of higher education?
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[McClellan AsstProf SUNY Canton]

I would no more trust this President and Congress to keep higher education and its accreditation unpoliticized and reliable than I would for them to: provide credible medicare/medicade prescription processes; fix broken borders; not spy on American citizens without a warrant; respond to Katrina; engage in a necessary war; and, not alter air and water quality programs to satisfy corporate entities. The last thing we need is the further military-industrial-complex of the current era to become a  Enron-fiasco-like higher education system that would only  satisfy big business and bored CEOs with the ability to make further inroads into managing higher education as they have everything else. The tendency for the “bottom-line” mentality and silly presumption that only corporate America and the politicians who benefit from their patronage (who love outsourcing, wage reduction for workers, union busting, and spurious profit generating criteria for their organizations, and questionable compensation for CEO types… to mention a few) is capable of running things is ridiculous as they are the architects of the befouling of what was once a represenative deocracy and the current accumulated billions of dollars indebtedness in which we find ourselves. More of the same from Washington at this point, is not only pointless but suicidal for higher education.

[small uni prof]

I'm in Texas and I would give almost anything to replace the accredidation agency here, but I agree that I would not trust the Bush administration to have anything to do with it.  The Southern Accredidation people come to campus, make recommendations and then never follow up to see if any changes have been made.  We need some changes badly and they suggested quite a few but almost none have been followed and, doubtless, never will and there will be no retribution.  I'd like to see a national agency that maintains standards and holds schools to them.

[Gavin Moodie, Australia]

Remember that the primary audience of college accreditation is not colleges and still less their professors and administrators.  The main audience is prospective students, employers and others who know little about what is good or acceptable practice in college teaching and administration.

As a foreigner it has taken me a considerable time to reach a rudimentary understanding of how US college accreditation works, despite being an avid reader of the Chronicle's daily report for some 3 years.  While I find the current system confusing, even more confusing would be a messy or incompletely explained and documented transfer to a new system.

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[A Coyote]

Soooo I went to the US Department of Ed’s web site to read some of the background material for myself and found The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education ISSUE PAPER#4 "Assuring Quality in Higher Education: Key Issues and Questions for Changing Accreditation in the United State".

Page 4 of the paper contains the following list:
   
   1. Success with respect to student achievement in relation to the institution's mission, including, as appropriate, consideration of course completion, State licensing examination, and job placement rates.
   1. Curricula.
   2. Faculty.
   3. Facilities, equipment, and supplies.
   4. Fiscal and administrative capacity as appropriate to the specified scale of operations.
   5. Student support services.
   6. Recruiting and admissions practices, academic calendars, catalogs, publications, grading, and advertising.
   7. Measures of program length and the objectives of the degrees or credentials offered.
   8. Record of student complaints received by, or available to, the agency.
   9. Record of compliance with the institution's program responsibilities under Title IV of the Act, based on the most recent student loan default rate data provided by the Secretary, the results of financial or compliance audits, program reviews, and any other information that the Secretary may provide to the agency.

Notice the numbering -- Oh well.

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[Mario Mastroniani]

The current system of accreditation is totally out of sync with the realities it proposes to address, ie. improve the quality of the graduates. In my own institution, being re-affirmed by SACS, there's a panic on who can teach what. Rather than looking for qualifications to teach, the university scared of SACS wants to see only credits earned by a professor in the specific subject of a course, in other words, credentials. Credentials have replaced qualifications, talent, expertise gained through means other than sitting in a classroom (such as research, consulting or serving in high level positions within professions). The system needs to be reviewed and hard questions asked.

[Small College Dean]

I have worked in several regions and have been involved with reaccreditations in more than one. The accreditation process is designed to standardize the offerings of the institutions so that students may transfer from institution to institution without penalty.

While the standards may be the same within regions, across the regions they are different.  The regional process does not need to be replaced.  It needs to be standardized.  If faculty in one region are required to have a "master's degree plus 18 graduate hours" in their primary area of instruction, then that should be so across the regions.  If the wording is to be "appropriately prepared" then that should be the requirement across the regions There needs to be some level of standardization required.

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[Tenn Prof]

I agree with Mario, SACS is inconsistent with the other accrediting agencies and I for one would like an even playing field nationwide.  

Other R1's can recuit excellent people we cannot due to what SACS considers being qualified.

[U.N. Own]

Although accreditation is important in that it establishes certain standards, I do not believe it does enought to ensure quality of education.  IN fact, having taught at several colleges I have come to the conclusion that it says little if anything about whether an institution is good.  

I have been in accredited schools which earned flying colors but couldn't afford photocopying and basic lab supplies.  

Certainly the number of faculty in a program should be relavent, are there enough to represent the discipline?
Certainly having sufficient funds to provide supplies and equipment for classes should be relavent?
Certainly the condition of permanent resources should play a role in accreditation?
Certainly whether or not faculty teach courses in the subdisciplines they are trained in plays a role?

As far as I can see, none of these plays any significant role in establishing accreditation.  At least not in the SE.

Whatever method is used, I applaud the idea of redoing the accreditation process in a manner that actually amounts to something other than a stamp of approval.

[John]

I am not necessarily against regional accreditation, nor am I against some federal guidelines to insure that regionals, or a particular regional (not naming any names!) do not run amuck.

(However, doesn't the U.S. Constitution somewhere state that education is within the purview of the states, not the federal government?)

It seems that the real issue is not education per se but economics--the federal government's concern over the considerable amount of $$ constantly being lost on education loans and grants that uncle sam makes or insures.  That problem is exacerbated by:
1) ballooning education costs
2) deadbeat borrowers
and that problem could perhaps be partially solved by: 1) the gov't putting a reasonable limit on the amount of money it will loan any one person for education and 2) going after the deadbeats.

It also might help if the gov't made sure that the schools that are approved to receive these funds actually TEACH and that monies are not being spent on things like research projects, athletic programs, or business endeavors.

(I don't mean to infer that research and athletics and business are not good things; I just think they should get their money from sources other than educational grants and loans.)

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[farm_boy]

Accreditation is a joke.

I taught 7 years at a pretend university where the administration began stockpiling documents a full year and-a-half before the accreditors' visit.  We had to redo every syllabus for every course we had ever taught, inserting the latest college of education buzz words, and making sure we had the official font and margin sizes.

I cut and paste nonsense into the "official" syllabuses, but since they had the proper font and margins, they passed with flying colors.

Not only do we need centralized accreditation, we also need standardized testing in the disciplines to help curb the hordes of idiots given diplomas at the pretend universities.

[bendedominicis]

I work at an American university abroad which has received most of its funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).  The US accreditation process evidently relies on a self-regulating system among regional accreditation agency member institutions.  The US regional accreditation agency apparently is serious about standards only when the actions of a member institution impinges on the interests of other member institutions.  Developments at American universities abroad have no immediate apparent impact on the interests of US institutions.  Consequently, the career interests of individuals with a personal or professional alliance or service to US universities with USAID contracts for international education projects and their allied accreditation agency personnel have a disproportionate degree of personal leeway in exploiting these USAID projects for their personal career financial, organizational and political interests.   

Note that these American-style universities may well be registered as a 501(c)(3) public charity, and they must therefore file an IRS Form 990 for public inspection.  Along with other information such as budgets, Form 990 requires the listing of the salary of senior administrators, along with the salaries of the top five non-administrative personnel.  These 990 forms are available at http://www.guidestar.org/

[earthboy]

Accreditation is a difficult issue not because it cannot be done but because the outcome-based paradigm depends on a murky culture of evidence—not all learning can be measured in precise terms, as in industry, particularly in the Humanities.  How would you measure the outcome of Liberal Arts education or Gen Ed?  For example, a student reads Homer in a course: what and how are you going to measure whatever he/she has learned?  How what she/he has learned is independent of his/her other learning activities, such as watching the TV?  If you work in a religious school, how are you going to measure “spiritual growth”?  How are you going to measure truly “life-long learning”?  Are you going to call your graduates every other week?  How can you tell what they have learned is independent of your institutional instruction?  Learning is not a factory work that can be measured by the production line on hourly basis.

Worse, accreditation fails to account for student behaviors.  When a student leaves school, he/she can do whatever he/she desires: we have no control whatsoever over his/her private life.  If a student truly desires not to learn, then what?  There are many just wanting the diploma, the paperwork.  Is it the teacher’s responsibility?  Motivating, I believe, is not the teacher’s responsibility; rather, it is the student’s.  You may have the best possible accreditation and outcome-based assessment in place and your administration can harass the faculty, usually weekly, with all the buzz-words in currency, but you have little control over the students’ behaviors, a tragic flaw in this capitalism-driven process. 

In this sense, accreditation works well to maintain the status quo—poor quality graduates every where and the same lip service from inept administrators.