Higher Education Accreditation Concepts and Proposals

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Higher Education Accreditation Concepts and Proposals

Goal: Improve and enhance academic quality and student success at colleges and universities. Strategy: Redesign and reform accreditation to strengthen the quality of colleges and universities, promote competition and innovation in higher education, and provide accountability to government stakeholders and taxpayers. General Background on Accreditation: Accreditation is a non-governmental process established by colleges and universities to evaluate, assure and improve educational quality in American higher education. It is a peer-review process designed to recognize and validate that an institution or program within an institution (e.g. nursing or business) meets a set of established standards and fosters a commitment to continued excellence. To become accredited, colleges and universities, as well as specific academic programs, apply to join private membership associations known as accrediting agencies. These agencies, in coordination with their member institutions or programs, develop standards and criteria around what constitutes "quality" higher learning. Pathways for institutions or programs seeking or reaffirming accreditation generally begin with institutions or programs completing a self-study report which consists of an internal review and examination of the organization's mission, educational objectives and performance with respect to the standards established by the accrediting body. Peer-reviewers ? faculty and administrative colleagues from other colleges and universities ? examine and evaluate the college, university or academic program against the agency's standards and make recommendations regarding the award of accredited status. This review process may occur as frequently as every few years or as infrequently as every 10 years. What is the Purpose and Role of Accreditation?

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Accreditation of colleges and universities generally serves two purposes:

1. Institutional Purpose: Colleges and universities assert that accreditation helps shape and guide the continuous quality improvement of their institutions and academic programs. Accreditation's unique, external peer-review process provides insight, feedback and recommendations on goals, policies and plans to fulfill educational missions and enhance academic quality. Accreditation can also help institutions make judgments about accepting academic credit from other colleges or universities.

2. Federal Government/Public Purpose: The federal government and the public rely on accreditation for quality assurance. As the federal government created new federal benefit programs, in the form of grants and loans, for veterans and college students pursuing higher education, it sought a mechanism or system to assure the quality of institutions where students were spending their federal funds. To accomplish this objective, the federal government deferred to an existing system ? accreditation ? to delegate the role of quality assurance and ensure that students were only using their federal funds at credible, legitimate and quality institutions.

The Korean War G.I. Bill of 1952 first established the formal relationship between accreditation and the federal government. It specified that veterans could only use their veteran education benefits at colleges and universities that were accredited by a federally recognized accreditor.

This same premise was reinforced in the Higher Education Act of 1965. Institutional eligibility for federal student aid programs such as grants and loans required colleges and universities to be accredited by an accrediting agency recognized by the Secretary of Education. Recognition meant that accreditors were determined to be a "reliable authority as to the quality of education or training offered" by the institutions of higher education or programs they accredit.1

Federal law was generally silent, though, on what was needed to achieve this recognition. It wasn't until the 1992 Higher Education Act Amendments that Congress defined in law the standards accreditors needed when assessing quality at institutions of higher education. Today, current law outlines 10 minimum standards: student achievement; curriculum; faculty; facilities; fiscal and administrative capacity; student support services; recruiting and admissions practices; measure of program length; student complaints; and compliance with Title IV program responsibility.

Problems That Need to be Addressed:

Accreditation serves dual roles as both a "gatekeeper" to federal funds and as a process for institutional improvement. The question for some is whether accreditation has two incompatible masters in universities and government.2 For universities, the purpose of accreditation has been

1 20 U.S.C. ? 1099b. 2 A. Lee Fritschler, "Accreditation's Dilemma: Serving Two Masters--Universities and Governments," Council for Higher Education Accreditation, September 22, 2008, .

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self-improvement. For the federal government, accreditation has served as quality control for its sizeable investment in higher education ? in fiscal year 2015, the federal government plans to spend over $138 billion in federal financial aid to help students attend approximately 6,000 colleges and universities.3

Today, many policymakers are asking serious questions about the effectiveness of accreditation's gatekeeping and quality assurance role as families, students and taxpayers across the country raise concerns about the cost, quality and value of American higher education.

As a result, the following issues are emerging as potential areas for debate in the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act:

A. Accreditation Has Not Always Produced or Improved Educational Quality

While many observers of higher education remark that the United States has the best colleges and universities in the world, that status is being put at risk by startling examples of deficiencies in collegiate instruction, academic rigor, and student success.

The design of judgments and assessments of student learning and quality at nearly 6,000 diverse colleges and universities varies tremendously, making the results difficult to compare across institutions. For example, an assessment of student achievement and learning at St. John's College, where curriculum is based on the Great Books program, would be unsuitable for Nashville's auto diesel college.

Nonetheless, the following snapshots from various assessment instruments provide a glimpse into how some students are faring at colleges and universities today:

Student Learning: According to research from Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum, Professors at University of Virginia and New York University, students have made few, if any, gains in critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and other skills taught in college: o 45% of students did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning during the first two years of college; and o 36% of students did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning over four years of college.4

Academic Rigor: According to Professor Roksa and Arum's review of student surveys on institutional curriculum, colleges lack rigor and engagement: o 32% of students each semester did not take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week; and o Half of students didn't take a single course in which they were required to write more than 20 pages over the course of a semester.5

3 U.S. Department of Education, "Student Aid Overview: FY2016 Budget Request," U.S. Department of Education, 2015: O-7, . 4 Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 5 Ibid.

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Student Engagement: According to results from the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE), students study almost half the amount that faculty expect they should: o Results suggest faculty expect students to study about 6 hours per week for a single class, but students report only studying a little less than 4 hours per week per class. 6

Basic Skills: According to research from the American Institutes for Research (AIR), many college graduates leave school without basic skills: o 20% of U.S. college students completing 4-year degrees, and 30% of students earning 2-year degrees, have only basic quantitative literacy skills, "meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies."7

Student Attainment and Achievement: According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks just 12th in the world (out of 37 countries) when it comes to our share of the population (ages 25 ? 34) with college degrees.8

Workforce Skills: Although 96% of chief academic officers at U.S. higher education institutions believe their institution "is very or somewhat effective at preparing students" for the workforce, only one-third of American business leaders agree that these institutions are graduating students with the skills and competencies their businesses need.9 Nearly a third of business leaders disagree, with 17% going as far as to say that they strongly disagree.10 Additionally, concerns are not limited to students' lack of applicable knowledge and skills in their respective career fields ? over a quarter of employers (26.2%) report that new workforce entrants with a four-year college degree are "deficient" in writing, a basic skill.11

6 Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, "FSSE and NSSE Results: Comparing faculty and student expectations for time spent preparing for class," Indiana University School of Education Center for Postsecondary Research, 2014, . 7 Justin D. Baer, Andrea L. Cook, and Stephane Baldi,"The Literacy of America's College Students," American Institutes for Research, January 1, 2006, . 8 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, "Education at a Glance 2013: United States," OECD, . 9 Gallup, Scott Jaschik, and Doug Lederman, "The 2014 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College & University Chief Academic Officers," Inside Higher Ed and Gallup, January 23, 2014, . 10 Preety Sidhu and Valerie J. Calderon, "Many Business Leaders Doubt U.S. Colleges Prepare Students," Gallup, February 26, 2014, . 11 The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management, "Are They Really Ready to Work? Employers' Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century U.S. Workforce," Partnership for 21st Century Skills, September 29, 2006, .

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According to the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, "accreditation is a highly successful and well-tested system of quality assurance and academic quality improvement."12 Yet some of these snapshots of student performance and quality were captured at our nation's accredited colleges and universities.

Our higher education system should be preparing students for better jobs and a better life, and its success will determine whether our nation's workforce is able to compete in a global and knowledge economy.

B. Accreditation Can Inhibit Innovation and Competition

Critics often assail accreditation's structure and design as anti-competitive and resistant to change. They charge that the system restricts innovative and new providers of higher education from entering the marketplace, continually protects and favors market incumbents with high barriers to entry, and reinforces existing and often expensive delivery models. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) summed it up as follows: "we have a broken accreditation system that favors established institutions while blocking out new, innovative and more affordable competitors."13

New Providers of Higher Education

In recent years there has been an emerging interest in so-called "non-college providers of higher education." These organizations teach or train students, but don't often look or feel like traditional colleges and universities. They make up a new category of knowledge providers and can take many shapes and sizes.

Organizations like General Assembly prepare students for jobs in software coding, product design and other technology fields in as little as 10 weeks with industry practitioners as faculty. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free, online courses that can be delivered by professors from elite institutions to community colleges and are hosted by technology companies such as Coursera and non-profits like edX. Some organizations such as Mozilla Foundation are developing open-source "digital badges" that allow more types of organizations to identify and recognize an individual's subject matter mastery and competency. Operations like StraighterLine provide online courses, but not degrees, for a monthly subscription fee of $99 plus $49 per course.

While these new entrants to higher education may offer students low-cost and high quality learning options, they generally don't fit the mold of traditional accreditation. They aren't aligned with the current accreditation regime's requirements of tenured faculties, award of formal degrees or certificates, campus facilities or typical governance structures. Unfettered by traditional accreditation's tendency to force standardization and uniformity in delivery models,

12 Council for Higher Education Accreditation, "Accreditation, Students and Society," Council for Higher Education Accreditation, June 2013, . 13 "Rubio Proposes Ideas for Higher Education Reform at Miami-Dade College," Official website of Senator Marco Rubio, February 10, 2014, .

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