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A New Movement for Accreditation Reform? Part I
Readers will find of interest the Center for College Affordability and Productivity's smart analysis of higher education accreditation, The Inmates Running the Asylum? In all honesty, they've clearly read ACTA's work. Drawing on ACTA materials Can College Accreditation Live Up To Its Promise? and "Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About It," as well as Anne Neal's "Dis-Accreditation" in Academic Questions (no link), Andrew Gillen, Daniel L. Bennett, and Richard Vedder convincingly argue for accreditation reform.
Vedder et al. quickly and cleverly divide the history of college accreditation into four eras: voluntary system, quality improvement, quality assurance, assessment movement. Mostly, though, they focus "on evaluating the performance of the current system and evaluating possible reforms." Their verdict? The current system is secretive to the public, unhelpful to colleges, and monopolistic to competitors. Given "legitimate concerns about the quality of higher education" and the likelihood of continued federal support for higher education, America needs indications of higher educational quality, and would benefit from those based on outcomes (i.e., student learning), as opposed to the inputs (square foot of educational space, for example) that the current accreditors use. Vedder et al. also helpfully point out a major weakness in the information accreditors provide: a binary system communicates virtually no information about a school to the public.
Is Congress listening? The federal government can do far more to protect the public interest than it now does, while promoting transparency and institutional autonomy. We’ll have more on this in future blogs.
Posted by Michael Pomeranz on October 22, 2010 at October 22, 2010 02:13 PM
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