ACTA's Must-Reads
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Developing the accreditation debate
ACTA's new policy paper, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About It, has drawn lots of attention since its release last month--and its no-nonsense approach to accreditation reform has elicited a chorus of agreement from both accreditors and academic officials.
In a response published at Inside Accreditation, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) acknowledged the validity of ACTA's arguments about how accreditors do little to enhance educational quality while raising costs and compressing the diversity of institutions. CHEA also observed that two of ACTA's recommendations are "fundamental to the future of accreditation and how it operates": 1) that the gatekeeping role accreditors perform for the government--effectively determining which schools are worthy of receiving federal student aid--should be reassessed; and 2) that accreditors should be more responsive to calls for public accountability. Finding much common ground with ACTA's position, CHEA's response indicated an encouraging willingness on the part of accreditors to revisit the terms upon which they operate.
Others are seeing the value of ACTA's recommendations, too. This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education is running a piece by Alan Contreras, an administrator at the Oregon Student Assistance Commission who contributes frequently to The Chronicle and to Inside Higher Ed. Best known in education circles for his work on diploma mills, Contreras has an abiding interest in accreditation as a means of differentiating fake schools from real ones, and he agrees wholeheartedly with ACTA that the link between accreditation and federal financial aid should be broken:
ACTA is quite right in one of its recommendations: that we should decouple accreditation from eligibility for federal grants and loans for students. Because financial aid is a major issue only for undergraduate programs, the many institutions around the country that offer degrees beyond the baccalaureate level now have no special incentive to become accredited. Indeed, the great majority of unaccredited colleges and universities with which I am familiar offer mainly or exclusively graduate degrees, especially religious degrees. The same is true of diploma mills, of course, whose customers mainly want doctorates.
Thus making accreditation independent of federal student aid would have the salutary effect of drying up many ineffective or unnecessary accreditors. It might also lead the federal government to set genuine standards for what makes a college good enough for federal aid, which would be a true--and long overdue--revolution.
And that's not the only place where Contreras and ACTA agree. Contreras wholeheartedly agrees with ACTA's indictment of accreditors for their failure to insist on a coherent core curriculum: "Colleges and universities at all levels should move toward making unified, required core curricula the bulk of the first two years of college."
He also reserves special praise for what he calls "the document's best part"--the manner in which it "thoroughly dissect[s] one of the strangest and least defensible aspects of today's accreditation system .... The idea that a college can be evaluated only by reference to its own goals." Accreditors' willingness to exempt colleges from accountability to established standards, Contreras notes, "is largely nonsense and needs to be revisited."
Of course, neither CHEA nor Contreras agrees with all the ideas put forth in ACTA's paper. But what we have in Contreras' piece--the misleading headline aside--is not just any agreement, but agreement to remarkable degree. This, surely, is testimony to how far this debate has traveled since ACTA's first report on accreditation--and as such it's a tantalizing taste of the progress that still stands to be made.
Posted by acta online at August 7, 2007 06:04 PM
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