Higher Education Accreditation
Who gets to choose what is acceptable when it comes to student performance in higher education; bottom-line, what agency sets the standards for accreditation. According to an April 19, 2007 article written by Doug Lederman, titled “Showdown Looms on Accreditation,” that appeared in Inside Higher Ed, “For months, college leaders and Education Department officials have been sparring over whether and how the federal government should change its rules governing higher education accreditation. The core issue: to what extent the department should demand that accrediting agencies, rather than individual colleges themselves, set minimum levels of acceptable performance by institutions on measures of how much their students learn.”
So, what’s the big deal anyway? Why shouldn’t the Department of Education and the federal government be allowed to change its own rules governing the standards by which to measure students? Well, the same reason you might not want the Department of Motor Vehicles to choose what you have for dinner, because it is federal intrusion, not on your dietary habits but into academic policy making by making it more institutionalized.
The Soft Sell Change
Although the Department of Education is beginning with a “soft sell,” many see this as the path to federal control. For example, Lederman reported:
“Most notably, institutions and programs themselves, rather than accrediting agencies, would be required to set their own ‘expected levels of performance’ and demonstrate that performance using ‘quantitative and qualitative measures that are externally validated, as appropriate.’
“But at their core, the regulations would seem to have largely the same end result: Because the standards would require accrediting agencies to judge ‘the appropriateness of the level of performance established by the institution or program’ and whether the institution has shown evidence of ‘acceptable performance,’ accreditors would still be telling institutions whether they are performing adequately.
“And because, under the draft regulatory language, the federal government would evaluate accreditors based on their ‘judgments’ of the institutions’ standards, the federal government would still be dictating definitions of ‘quality’ to American colleges, if slightly less directly, critics say.
“‘At the end of the day, this would be federalizing accreditation,’ said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, higher education’s main lobbying group. ‘It would represent a fundamental change in the relationship between accreditors and schools, and therefore between the Department of Education and schools.’”
Transfer of Academic Credit Issues
It appears as if the other hot button issue that is being raised with the policy changes is the issue of transfer credit between colleges, specifically between accredited for-profit schools and regionally accredited colleges. Lederman wrote:
“The new regulatory language released by the department this week would also make a change in the other most controversial aspect of its agenda: accreditors’ and colleges’ policies on the transfer of academic credit. Officials of many for-profit and other nationally accredited colleges have complained that the academic credits of their students are routinely turned away by regionally accredited colleges in the admissions process, based solely on the fact that they came from nationally accredited colleges. This issue deeply divides nonprofit and for-profit colleges, and the latter have pushed hard for a change in federal policy.
“The new proposals maintain a plan to require accrediting agencies to have policies stating that the colleges they monitor cannot base decisions about whether to accept a transferring student’s credits on the accreditation status of the ‘sending’ institution, and to require that institutions inform prospective students about their transfer policies. But the department’s new proposal would eliminate the previous draft’s requirement that an accrediting agency must ‘ensure’ that a college’s decisions on credit transfer are not made based on accreditation status. Accrediting officials had complained that that requirement would force them to become ‘cops’ auditing colleges’ transfer policies, and department officials say the change would eliminate that problem.”
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