This was very interesting and I learned a couple of things from this report.


POINT OF VIEW
How Not to Fix Accreditation

8-7-07, The Chronicle of Higher Education



The recent release of another critique of accreditation provides an opportunity to sort through some of the mass of ill-informed rhetoric in Washington regarding the nature and limitations of collegiate approval processes. The new report, "Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policy Makers Can Do About It," comes from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a generally conservative organization, which advocates educational reform. Some of what it contains is a helpful commentary on what doesn't work well in the accreditation process. But some is irrelevant or misinformed.

One of the basic assertions in the report is that "virtually all colleges and universities in the United States are accredited." Although that is a common belief, it is not correct. In fact, about a fifth of degree-granting institutions operating legally in the United States are unaccredited.

I found 1,045 such colleges and universities in a survey I did, to which 34 states responded; to that we can add an unknown number from the 16 states that did not answer. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation shows 4,242 additional degree-granting institutions in the United States that are accredited, according to the most recent numbers available, from 2005. Therefore, roughly 20 percent of American colleges and universities are not accredited.

How can it be that so many colleges have escaped the supposedly unavoidable clutches of the wicked accreditation agencies — driven, as ACTA seems to think, by a lust for control in the service of mediocrity? For the simple reason that neither accreditors nor the federal government give approval for colleges to operate. States do.

Many states don't require that colleges earn accreditation. In California, for instance, you do not even need to have attended an accredited institution to be licensed as a lawyer or psychologist. As of 2006, California had 179 unaccredited secular institutions that granted degrees; the estimated 250 religious colleges in the state are on top of that. Florida, as another example, had 35 unaccredited, secular degree-granting institutions in 2007.

The worst are the so-called Seven Sorry Sisters, the states with such awful oversight of college quality that they are considered havens for diploma mills. The actual number in the group varies, depending on which states have the worst standards or oversight at a given time; the current Sisters are Alabama, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, New Mexico, and either Missouri or Wyoming, depending on which way the political winds blow at the moment. Indeed, in several of those states, operators of substandard colleges are major political players whose goal is to make sure that the states never have genuine, enforceable standards.

Fortunately there has been recent progress in Idaho, New Mexico, and Wyoming, though that is offset by the collapse of California's standards agency, an event that benefits bad institutions while tainting the good ones.

That, then, is the set of control structures that ACTA believes we can rely on. As of today, it can't do the job.

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.

But the next step recommended by ACTA, to have the federal government rely solely on measures of fiscal stability in assessing an institution's eligibility for financial aid, strikes me as strangely out of tune with ACTA's own goals. Why does an organization that bellows about the need for better-quality undergraduate education limit itself to a timid squeak when discussing processes with which to replace accreditation? And the proposal to use time to completion and graduation rates as measures of quality, which they are not, isn't much different from allowing low-standard states to apply their own meaningless standards. Some states — such as Ohio, Oregon, and Texas — have good standards in place, but states like the Sisters do not.

I can assure ACTA that many of the nation's diploma mills have done a magnificent job of managing their money — their owners have in some cases become quite wealthy, and their degree-sales operations are models of efficiency. If the only meaningful criterion for federal involvement is to ensure sound money management, then ACTA will fail spectacularly in its attempt to keep federal student aid out of the hands of "fly by night" institutions.

According to the report, ACTA wants academ- ic quality control left primarily to the states and the market. First, allow me to reintroduce the Sisters as examples of what can and does happen in state regulation. Certainly some states do a very good job of making sure that their standards are both good and enforced. Texas has taken the laudable step of evaluating federally recognized accreditors; the state has concluded that some of them don't meet its standards. But I know of only one such conscientious state, and at least seven Sisters.

Second, Americans sometimes speak of the market as though we were speaking of the Bible, or perhaps the New York Yankees — something that, although imperfect, is by its nature an object of veneration. In fact, the presence of a thriving industry that sells fake and substandard college degrees to thousands of Americans every year points out the problem: Just because something can be sold to many willing buyers does not make it a good thing. Diploma-mill degrees are the pornography of higher education, and like pornography will always have a market.

For some of ACTA's other recommendations, I will give the group the benefit of the doubt, or at least the benefit of acknowledging its mission. That is especially the case with faculty credentials. ACTA is an organization that is interested in undergraduate education, not graduate programs. For that reason, its insistence that faculty members do not need to have Ph.D.'s is not quite the laugher that it first seems to be. The idea is not crazy, and allowing people without Ph.D.'s to teach is common practice in the fine arts and some technical fields — which rely more on professional skill or aesthetic judgment than on the ability to do traditional scholarly research. But it doesn't work in most graduate or research programs, as organizations that focus on such education understand.

The report does thoroughly dissect one of the strangest and least defensible aspects of today's accreditation system in the sections on institutional mission, perhaps the document's best part. The idea that a college can be evaluated only by reference to its own goals is largely nonsense and needs to be revisited by accreditors.

And the report rightly hopes that we will see a return to a meaningful core curriculum, to which I can only say amen. Colleges and universities at all levels should move toward making unified, required core curricula the bulk of the first two years of college.

Accreditation is not working well, and we certainly need a better system of quality control for American colleges and universities. But ACTA has not recommended a feasible replacement.

Alan Contreras is administrator of the Office of Degree Authorization of the Oregon Student Assistance Commission, and a frequent contributor to The Chronicle.


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