West Coast Accreditor Raises Bar on For-Profits, Community Colleges, and Elite Universities Alike

The scattered, uncoordinated, and uneven patch-work quilt that is higher education accreditation has outlived its usefulness. It no longer has the ability to meet the needs of a large and growing, more diverse and demanding higher education environment--and hasn't for a lpng time. And now the constituencies and customers of higher education, the students, public and the government, are in clear need of a more comprehensive, standardized system that measures and reports how effectively it actually educates its various student populations. The time has come, and yes, it doubtless must fall to the government, federal or state, to administer or oversee it.

But it will take some time to generate consensus among higher education institutions, their constituencies and the government. As we will see, the most prestigious of schools want no part of such a a change, nor do most others. But there is at least one regional accreditor which is getting out ahead of the curve, one which is taking on the charter of moving the existing accreditation process in that new direction.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Too often, accreditors react to criticism with a defensive crouch. So it's been gratifying to watch one regional accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, or WASC, take a different approach in recent weeks, setting an example for others to follow. 

WASC oversees higher education in California, Hawaii, and the Pacific islands. In early July it rejected an application from the high-flying publicly traded company Bridgepoint Education. Although Bridgepoint's corporate headquarters are in a downtown San Diego office tower, the anchor of its fast-growing online operation, Ashford University, is in Clinton, Iowa, at the former home of Franciscan University of the Prairies. 

[...] Seven years, more than 200,000 students, vast sums of taxpayer-supported financial aid, and several Congressional hearings later, Bridgepoint had apparently worn out its welcome with Franciscan's former accreditor, and decided to look for approval closer to its corporate home. But WASC turned it down, for reasons that included a paucity of faculty at Ashford and the fact that 128,000 out of 240,000 students had dropped out over the last five years. "That level of attrition," said WASC's president, Ralph A. Wolff, "is, on its face, not acceptable." 

WASC did something else that day which received much less publicity but was, in the long run, probably more important: It posted its rejection letter to Bridgepoint on the Internet for the world to see.  

WASC has also swum into the politically treacherous waters of judging colleges based on whether students graduate and how much they learn. Most colleges gather little or no information about success rates among the profitable and growing adult-student population. WASC will soon require detailed information about the success of nontraditional students. 

More controversially, WASC is asking four-year colleges and universities to provide some evidence of how much their students are learning, and to compare that success to similar institutions. This is just common sense.  

[...] Yet WASC's proposal has met with fierce opposition from the region's elite research universities, including Stanford and the University of California. This is unsurprising, if depressing... The richest, most famous, most exclusive institutions with the most Nobel Prize winners on the faculty are presumed to offer the highest-quality undergraduate education. It's not true, but there's a lot of money and power tied up in the fiction that it is.  

[...] Elite universities have an enormous capacity to set tone and precedent in higher education, as Stanford and others have done recently, to their credit, in legitimizing low-cost online courses. If high-profile institutions embraced the idea of being accountable and transparent for student learning, others would follow. By rejecting such accountability, Stanford and universities like it are helping to perpetuate a system in which far too many college students receive a substandard education. 

---"Why One Accreditor Deserves Some Credit. Really." by Kevin Carey, The Chronicle of Higher Education (7.30.2012)

I wish I had something profound or useful to add to this article. But it really says it all. As it also notes, accreditors have origins and a long history that stressed a "voluntary, peer-based approach [which] made sense in an era when higher education was a smaller, more private affair." But from the period following WWII until today, the expansion and increasing complexity of public and private nonprofit higher education--and now, for-profit higher education--has been driven by increasing public demand by more diverse student populations with increasing reliance on government educational loans to finance them. And the accreditation process has had to scramble to expand and become more sophisticated and relevant in the process. As noted, the assessment of it's success today has varied, but with increasing criticism about the relvance of its charter and ability to carry it out. 

Can existing regional higher education accreditors evolve enough--and quickly enough--to meet today's and tomorrow's accreditation needs? Can they bring more standardization to broader measures and processes?  Can they remove the sensed need to look to the government to assume or oversee this role? Perhaps. But as encouraging as this stance by the WASC is, it is just an isolated ray of hope in this mired and dispiriting business. And the expected failure of many other accreditors to follow suit will just make more clear the need for government standardization and oversight, and the lack of any effective alternative.

Link:

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-One-Accreditor-Deserves/133179/