Despite Broad Support, Accreditors Face the Challenges of Navigating Political Conflicts and Supporting Innovation
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At a time when accreditors are ensnared in political debates and accused of not changing with the times, a Chronicle of Higher Education survey found firm — if not overwhelming — support for postsecondary education’s quality-control process. In the Chronicle survey conducted in April, a strong minority of the 415 administrators at two- and four-year colleges were critical of accreditation. Twenty-six percent said, for example, that accreditation consumes too much time and money. (The survey was underwritten by Watermark Insights.)
In survey comments and supplementary interviews, college administrators and accreditors themselves questioned the role of the organizations. In their federally mandated quest for encouraging continuous improvement, should accreditors be incubators for big leaps forward — “disruptive innovation?” Or should they just approve programs that colleges propose, with some nudges toward innovation by sharing best practices at member meetings?
The nation’s highly complex system of quality control for postsecondary education of all sorts — from cosmetology to the standard four-year liberal-arts degree and beyond — was born in 1787 in New York State, when an organization called the University of the State of New York began accrediting colleges in the state. Over its history, accreditation has been no stranger to controversy. It has evolved like a tangled garden that has grown up around a home with many owners, each with their own idea of what the garden should be.
Accreditors are easy for critics to malign as being slow and bureaucratic, but few people want to drive across a bridge built by an engineer who didn’t learn the right formulas for load-bearing structures, or be treated by a physician who had insufficient anatomy instruction.
Accreditation is not easily explained, even to those employed in higher education. “I still haven’t figured out an elevator pitch when the subject of accreditation comes up,” says Joseph Vibert, executive director of the Association of Specialized and Professional Accreditors, a member organization of more than 100 accreditors who supervise professional programs specializing in various areas from midwifery to funeral services. “It’s usually a conversation stopper,” he adds
Stig Leschly, president and founder of the Postsecondary Commission, an organization seeking to become a new accreditor of nonprofit colleges that will focus on transparency and the economic mobility of students, says accreditation “may be the most important institution in American society about which most people know almost nothing.”
Students often don’t realize the elaborate, interlocking structure of accreditation, in which institutions need state approval to operate, often have to generate graduates who can pass state licensing exams, and need to abide by U.S. Department of Education requirements. Seven accreditors that were once known as “regional accreditors” are now, after Department of Education actions in 2019, national accreditors, at least in theory.
Accreditation has become a political battleground in some states, including Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. A Florida law requires public colleges to switch accreditors when their accreditation comes up for renewal, in apparent retribution for investigations by an existing accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools questioned restrictions to professors’ academic freedom and a presidential search at the University of Florida. A bill being considered in Ohio would ban diversity training, dictate graduation requirements for some majors, and even interfere with what is taught in certain courses. More political conflicts involving accreditors are on the way, with some tied to the culture war over the concept of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
One question on the Chronicle survey asked respondents if they agreed with the statement, “The accreditation system does a good job ensuring academic quality in higher education.” A majority – 84 percent – either agreed or strongly agreed.
In another question, respondents were asked to reply to the statement, “The accreditation system does a good job of holding higher-education institutions accountable for student outcomes.” Again, the majority of respondents — 76 percent — agreed or strongly agreed.
Paul L. Gaston III, an emeritus professor at Kent State University who wrote a 2014 book, Higher Education Accreditation: How It’s Changing, Why It Must, says he was “pleasantly surprised by the strong vote of confidence” in accreditation. When he served as provost at both Kent State and Northern Kentucky University, he says he heard a lot of complaints from fellow administrators about accreditation being distracting and intrusive. In the end though, he says, administrators realize that accreditation provides the strongest incentive they have for creating positive change.
Jamienne S. Studley, president of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission, says that during the 10 years she has been working in accreditation the process has become faster and clearer about the required steps and information that institutions need to provide, and is more dedicated to innovation and supporting the variety of institutions that students need. At the same time, she says, accreditors have to keep a sharp eye out for institutions at risk of failing financially or academically and respond swiftly when necessary.
Louis Soares, chief learning and innovation officer at the American Council on Education, says that accreditors have started focusing more on learning outcomes. Eventually, he says, as accreditors keep moving in that direction, the public will realize that specific outcomes and skills are associated with specific degrees. Cognitive science, educational research, and the amount of learning that takes place digitally will make it easier to more precisely measure outcomes and improve learning, he says.
Others have less faith in accreditors’ ability to enforce educational quality. Robert Kelchen, head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and author of a 2018 book on Higher Education Accountability, says that when accreditors take action it tends to be based more on financial issues, such as a college running out of money, instead of academic ones. When accreditors take action on academic quality, he says, the actions tend to be based on egregious failures. He sees accreditors as more of a net that catches the very worst institutions than as a broad booster of quality.
Michael B. Horn, a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a nonprofit think tank, was also surprised by the proportion of survey respondents who saw accreditors as ensuring academic quality. “That doesn’t match what I think of as the outcomes that students are getting from the experience,” he says.
During the pandemic, “all of a sudden accreditation realized its job wasn’t to be slow and deliberative.”
Horn praises the job that accreditors did during the Covid-19 pandemic, however, agreeing with the 40 percent of survey respondents who said that accreditors helped with emergency remote learning. “All of a sudden accreditation realized its job wasn’t to be slow and deliberative,” he says. “And I don’t mean that pejoratively. They realized, ‘Hey, house on fire, what’s our best purpose?’” Accreditors helped institutions that were unfamiliar with online education to connect with experts in online education at more savvy institutions, he says.
Survey respondents’ skepticism strengthened when they were asked if accreditors fostered academic innovation, including innovation in online education and innovation in competency-based innovation. A majority of respondents — 59 percent — either disagreed or strongly disagreed that accreditation in American higher education fostered academic innovation.
Those results made some accreditors bristle, particularly those who feel they are unfairly lumped in with more conservative accreditors. Michael K.J. Milligan is chief executive officer of ABET, once known as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. ABET has rapidly evolved into a global organization in recent years, accrediting more than 4,000 college and university programs in applied and natural sciences, computing, engineering, and engineering technology. While ABET accreditation of a program is not a requirement for federal financial aid in the United States, it is essential for licensing in all U.S. states and territories, and for getting an ROTC scholarship. A degree from an ABET-accredited program is a job requirement for many government and corporate positions. “Especially in the STEM fields, innovation is key to our success, right?” says Milligan. “I mean, it’s what’s going to drive change in the world. It’s going to improve our quality of life. It’s going to help save our planet.” Academic quality in engineering and other STEM fields was always best measured by learning outcomes, says Milligan, and programmatic success would ideally be measured not just by the earning power of graduates, but by their social impact.
ABET has promoted innovation in the programs it works with by, among other efforts, offering an annual Innovation Award that includes a $10,000 prize.
Gaston, the author from Kent State, has been on the boards of accreditors but resigned from such positions when he started his book on the topic. He says accreditors “are doing more to promote innovation than any other sector of higher education.” When an institution comes up for accreditation renewal, he says accreditors routinely require strengthening programs that are expected to make the institution more effective. “I don’t know of any kind of incentive or prompt to innovation that is more effective than that,” he says
Belle S. Wheelan, president and chief executive officer of the most politically embattled of the national accreditors, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, says the organization is open to new ideas and new forms of delivering postsecondary education. But she says the accreditor must make sure institutions have qualified faculty, equipment, financial resources, and anything else that is needed for a new program to serve students successfully. “Unfortunately, many institutions propose new programs when they are in financial trouble,” she says, “because they think this new innovative idea is going to get them out of financial trouble when the reality is that it could bury them deeper into financial trouble.”
She and other accreditors say that the relationship with accredited institutions is, in fact, a relationship and not just a paperwork exchange. “We try to work with our institutions as much as possible,” she says. If the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools gets a new prospectus from an institution and the goals aren’t clear, a staff member will call the institution and try to tease out what it was the institution was trying to say and, if appropriate, encourage the institution to resubmit it.
One of the things accreditors are looking for when it comes to innovation is clear evidence that students will benefit from a proposed change, says Vibert, at the Association of Specialized and Professional Accreditors. “We don’t want students to be guinea pigs.”
Few people responding to the survey or interviewed separately doubted that accreditors can handle incremental innovation, such as small changes in existing programs or new programs grafted onto thriving institutions. A more important question, observers say, is whether accreditors are fostering major innovation. Wheelan says that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools has a summer institute each year on learning outcomes: How institutions can create meaningful requirements for learning outcomes; how they can measure fulfillment of those requirements; and how they can change programs and teaching to improve outcomes.
The organization’s annual meeting also presents an opportunity for institutions to showcase and share innovation, she says
Scholars of accreditation say that nonprofit higher-education institutions built on completely different models from traditional-degree institutions can have a hard time winning accreditation. Such startups don’t have access to capital markets and need to attract students who can’t get financial aid and are willing to risk getting an unaccredited degree.
Soares, at ACE, and some of his colleagues published a study of such an institution, College Unbound, in Providence, R.I., which took 12 years to win full accreditation, although its students were able to begin receiving federal financial aid after seven years. The college awards a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership and change, and seeks out low-income adult learners who are returning to higher education. Typically, the students have faced significant barriers to higher education but have already earned some course credits. The ACE study describes the college as student-driven, not just student-centered. College Unbound had to win authorization to operate in Rhode Island, get regional accreditation from the New England Commission of Higher Education, and apply to the Department of Education so its students would be eligible for federal financial aid.
Scholars of accreditation say that institutions built on completely different models from traditionaldegree institutions can have a hard time winning accreditation.
Kelchen, at the University of Tennessee, is trying to help Knoxville College, a historically Black institution founded in 1875, to win back accreditation. The college used to work with a regional accreditor but is now seeking approval from the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. Meeting financial metrics with a handful of students will be difficult, says Kelchen. He and a group of doctoral students have been working with the college to draft the required policies and procedures and fill out the accreditation application. “It is a beast,” he says.
In the search for innovation in American higher education, many caution that it can be too easy to play “blame the accreditors.” Leschly, at the Postsecondary Commission, says, “I would not assign to accreditors the responsibility for the low level of innovation in U.S. higher education.”
Rather, he says, look to colleges themselves: “Like all mature organizations, accreditors or no accreditors, they struggle to change.”
The Postsecondary Commission, he says, ultimately hopes to develop a rigorous approach using social science to analyze how colleges can produce economic mobility for students who come from low-income families and attend poor schools. Finding a way to do that analysis, he says, could help all accreditors.
The nature of American education will determine which innovations will succeed, says Soares. “Right now, we’re an enrollment-based enterprise,” he says. “And if innovations are not connected to enrollment, they’re less likely to be sticky.”
Accreditors face twin challenges in the coming years. The public appears to have little understanding of how accreditors operate at a time when accreditors need public support. Ninety percent of respondents to the Chronicle survey said the American public does not understand what accreditors do in higher education. Fifty-five percent said that accreditation does not produce public information that is useful to students and their families.
In the past, detailed judgements about colleges, especially negative ones, were kept confidential, out of the desire to avoid embarrassing institutions. But now, even some critics say progress has been made in making more accreditation findings public. “I think that accreditation has become more transparent,” says Gaston, at Kent State. “But I don’t think it is nearly transparent enough to the public.”
Vibert says his organization’s code of good practice encourages members to make information public that would be useful to students and their families. Increasingly, he says, accreditors are either doing that or requiring the programs they accredit to do so.
At the WASC Senior College and University Commission, Studley says providing information to the public is not the organization’s “central job,” but it does have a key indicators dashboard, which is intended more for institutions than for students but can be understood by consumers. “We do want people to understand what it means to be accredited,” she says. (The U.S. Department of Education uses College Scorecard, which focuses on financial indicators such as average annual cost and graduates’ median earnings.)
At the Southern Association, Wheelan says the organization does not hear much from the public. All the public generally wants to know, she says, is if an institution is accredited and, if not, what the problem is.
More worrisome to accreditors and those who track them is the running series of state political battles over issues such as diversity training.
“There’s a proxy battle between the federal government and conservative states, and accreditors are caught squarely in the middle,” says Kelchen, at the University of Tennessee.
When asked to choose the biggest issue facing accreditors, respondents most often picked “Political pressures from federal and state lawmakers” from a list of nine options.
In brief, accreditors have become political pawns in the culture wars. When it comes to colleges, liberals have historically been concerned about consumer protection, and conservatives have seen colleges as breeding grounds for leftist ideology. Those issues are now playing out in some states, particularly southern ones.
Accreditors generally see the politicization of diversity and inclusion as unfortunate. Vibert looks at the issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion from his perspective as a former physical therapist. “It didn’t matter what color those patients were, who they loved, or what their religion was,” he says. “My concern was this person has an infirmity, a disability, or a sickness, and I wanted to be the person who helps them get better.”
That, he says, means health-care professionals need to learn about different cultures and religions so they can give respectful, relevant health care.
Kelchen worries that conservatives trying to bend colleges to their political viewpoint will be egged on by state legislatures to sue accreditors, who are not equipped for such legal battles. “Accreditors are not wealthy organizations,” Kelchen says. “They try to keep membership fees as low as possible, and they spend their money on reviewing institutions.”
When it comes to legal battles, accreditors would appreciate support from the Department of Education, but they know that more supervision from the department could be a double-edged sword: With a change in administrations, federal support could turn into political pressure, and accreditors would be whipsawed.
That may explain the ambivalent response when those participating in the Chronicle survey were asked, “Should the U.S. Education Department provide more oversight of accreditors?” Fifty-six percent of respondents said no, 34 percent said yes, and 9 percent said they didn’t know.
When it comes to legal battles, accreditors would appreciate support from the Department of Education, but they know that more supervision from the department could be a double-edged sword.
In Florida, so far, pressure from the state government for colleges to change their accreditor has not worked because the Department of Education has not approved any applications for changes. The department requires that changes of accreditors be voluntary, and Florida colleges are having difficulty proving that, since it is state law that is trying to force them to make a change.
“They are still my members,” says Wheelan. “We’re still treating them like my members. They still have representation on our Board of Trustees.”
Gaston says accreditors could do more to work together and send a common message about their shared values, how they operate, and how they make recommendations. A well-informed public, he says, would result in more confidence in the work that accreditors do.
Another question in the Chronicle survey related to politics and policymaking was if the dual roles of accreditors — holding institutions to certain standards and serving as gatekeepers to federal student aid — should be separated. Fifty-eight percent of respondents disagreed with that idea.
“This is not something that accreditation asked for,” says Gaston of the financial-aid-gatekeeping role. The role was imposed on accreditors in the early stages after the GI Bill was passed in 1944, Gaston says, creating a flood of financial aid for veterans. “I’ve been on panels on this subject several times,” says Gaston, “and my question is always, ‘Who’s going to do this job better?’” There is, he says, never a coherent answer.
As accreditation evolves it may become more global, at least for those accreditors focusing on specialized professions.
Michael Milligan says that when he joined ABET 13 years ago, the organization accredited fewer than 200 programs outside the United States. Now it accredits more than 1,000. “The international market has really exploded,” he says.
ACE’s Louis Soares thinks that, in America, it is still an open question if “accreditation can foster innovation in a way that we need it to.”
In America, it is still an open question if “accreditation can foster innovation in a way that we need it to.”
Many in higher education are working toward more variety in providing education and at improving equitable access. Accreditors may evolve to cover the ever-changing world of nondegree programs: badges, microcredentials, apprenticeships, and vocational certificates, some of which are getting more recognition as having educational and economic value.
“We need to keep our eyes on the diversity of learners and what we need to serve them,” says Soares. “That is going to be the best guide we have moving forward.”
In April 2023, The Chronicle emailed surveys to 8,000 administrators, and 415 responded. Directors made up the largest portion of respondents (28 percent), followed by vice presidents (15 percent), deans (13 percent), and associate, assistant, and vice provosts (12 percent). Smaller numbers of presidents, provosts, deans, department heads, and other administrators answered the survey.
Forty percent of respondents work at public four-year institutions, 44 percent at private four-year colleges, and 17 percent at public two-year colleges.
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