Newscap March 2011

Higher education is at a crossroads. Never has it been more important to educate our citizens, and never has it been more difficult to ensure we’re actually educating them. Today, one of our main tools, accreditation, faces a trio of dilemmas: validity, transparency, and cost.

When it comes to validity, accreditation faces a number of issues. First, it remains focused primarily on process rather than outcomes. Second, its pass/fail nature (with virtually all institutions “passing”) provides little evidence of an institution’s relative success (or lack thereof), at least in the public domain. Third, the nature of accreditation teams, composed almost entirely of people from within the academy and those with relatively modest accreditation training, does not inspire confidence and raises the question of conflict of interest in the reviews.

Related to validity is the problem of transparency. How can we believe in the validity of this essentially private process, in which none of the individual findings within a review are made public (unless an institution chooses to do so), only the outcome? In addition, the pass/fail nature of accreditation (with some variations) fails to meet the test of modern quality assurance schemes, which provide assessments of quality based on performance (think Consumer Reports, with its quarter, half, three‐quarter, and full-moon ratings). To some extent other new forms of accountability, such as the voluntary system of accountability (VSA) and Transparency by Design (TBD) have begun to provide rudimentary evidence of “differences” in performance, but in general American higher education has resisted such efforts, contending that such differences are one of the strengths of higher education system. That argument sounds a bit self-serving in the modern era. After all, higher education compares itself on issues of quality in other areas—like intercollegiate athletics—and does so in ways that preserve our differences. It simply makes no sense that an institution with a 12 percent graduation rate has the same accreditation status as Stanford University, with its 98 percent completion rate.

A final dilemma, especially relevant today, is accreditation’s cost. On the one hand, it’s too expensive; on the other, it’s not expensive enough. The current self‐study approach to accreditation costs institutions quite a bit because of the substantial amount of time and effort it requires. And the process also costs accrediting agencies, or it would if they relied on professional evaluators. Instead, to defray such expenses, we rely heavily on volunteers from within the academic community. The result: A process that has little professional evaluation expertise—which once again returns us to the question of validity.

What to do about a system that’s validity-challenged, nontransparent, and both too expensive and not expensive enough? The answer is not to abandon accreditation, nor to have it revert to serving one or the other of its dual roles: institutional self‐improvement and public quality assurance. Instead, we should change accreditation so that it’s more efficacious in both areas.

With respect to the institutional self‐improvement process, I believe it is a pretty good system as is. I’m quite impressed with the changes that the Northwest Commission has adopted, moving us toward a continuous improvement model, rather than the current 10-year plan. It will be important to ensure that this process maintains a focus on change and improvement in a cohesive strategic way, not in ad hoc incremental steps.

Measuring outcomes remains an area that needs more focus. This is true both for student learning and with respect to other critical missions of the institutions, such as research. Our measures need to assure greater externally substantiated content validity, and institutions need to be held accountable for achieving improvement toward their goals.

The public quality assurance process should be separated from the self‐improvement process, done more frequently (no less than every three years), and focused on fully transparent metrics that examine critical outcomes, including student learning, completion rates and numbers, and the successful transition of former students to the next step in their lives. Furthermore, these metrics should provide information that allows external customers of this quality assurance process to know the difference between institutions that perform exceptionally well (in comparison to their peers), institutions whose performance is average, those that perform below average, and those whose performance is abysmal.

In sum, the dilemma with modern accreditation is that it isn’t modern. The solution is not to abandon it but to change it into a contemporary process that genuinely assures quality. And we can do it. We already do it for activities like college sports—surely we can do it for our core business, education.

—David Longanecker

March 2011  | Share this on Twitter | Post this on Facebook