So the last entry promised a section-by-section look at the SACSCOC Principles of Accreditation focusing on proscriptive and flexible elements. I’ll get to that, but it is timely to look at Executive Order 14279 Reforming Accreditation To Strengthen Higher Education. Many smart people have written about this so I will add my voice for those who care to read the blog.
The executive order begins by indicating that accreditors have failed because, according to the executive order, they approve institutions that are low-quality by the most important measures (note measures in plural, but only the completion measure was specifically mentioned). This section goes on to mention low or negative ROI programs and the “exorbitant sums” charged by institutions. This paragraph of the executive order clearly begins with the failure of accreditors, then meanders away to program ROI and fees charged by institutions, neither of which is currently part of accreditation. The next paragraph says that institutions have chosen not to fix these issues in favor of furthering “discriminatory ideology”. The executive order does specifically call out the America Bar Association, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education for their admissions policies, but is painting with a rather broad brush here.
Those of us in Florida or those who have kept an eye on things here may have noticed, as I did, that we got a special shout-out in the executive order. “Accreditors have also abused their governance standards to intrude on State and local authority.”
The executive order then promises to fix the “dysfunctional accreditation system” by forcing institutions to focus on high-quality programs at reasonable prices. An important addition here is, “Federal recognition will not be provided to accreditors engaging in unlawful discrimination in violation of federal law.” Hmm…seems like it would be the institutions engaging in such behaviors as defined by the executive order.
The executive order then introduces “New Principles of Student-Oriented Accreditation” and then a list of things the Secretary of Education shall do. This is getting a bit long so I wont go through all of them, but consider the following quotes and my perception in italics.
- “barriers are reduced that limit institutions from adopting practices that advance credential and degree completion” OK, but many barrier reducing things that institutions have done to increase credential and degree completion focus on student populations that are underprepared and underperforming. Unfortunately, supporting an underperforming student population looks a lot like…how was it put?… unlawful discrimination.
- “accreditation requires that institutions support and appropriately prioritize intellectual diversity amongst faculty” It appears that prioritizing diversity is bad when it has a racial or ethnic context, but good when seeking higher numbers of conservative professors.
- “accreditors are prohibited from engaging in practices that result in credential inflation” I admit I had to look this up. I read about two drivers of credential inflation. The first was upskilling of positions by adding responsibilities that require more education (or the experience that more education brings). The second is a mismatch of supply and demand. Higher numbers of educated job seekers lead employers to use a degree as a screening tool for jobs that don’t necessarily require the minimum degree listed. Maybe I read the wrong sources, but I can’t see how accreditors are contributing to this. In fact, boosting credential and degree completion numbers would seem to exacerbate the supply and demand problem.
- “mandate that accreditors require member institutions to use data on program-level student outcomes to improve such outcomes without reference to race, ethnicity, or sex” Institutions I have worked with know that I advocate for carrying the institutional measures of student success used in SACSCOC Core Requirement 8.1 into each academic program in such a way that, at the program-level, student success is monitored and supported in a meaningful way. However, conspicuously absent here are the measures that are to be used.
- “launch an experimental site…to accelerate innovation and improve accountability by establishing new flexible and streamlined quality assurance pathways for higher education institutions that provide high-quality, high-value academic programs” I’m a pretty smart person and I can’t figure out what this means. Are the feds going to track all this IE data? What is a streamlined QA pathway in higher education? And this is only for institutions with high-quality, high-value academic programs? Who decides which institutions get to play? It seems like the ones without such programs would need this more than the ones with.
- “streamline the process for higher education institutions to change accreditors” The time-consuming part of this is learning the language of the new accreditor, navigating the process of producing a compelling case for compliance with each required standard, and working within the governance cycle of the new accreditor. Oh, and keeping up with your day job since many institutions don’t have full-time accreditation experts on staff. If you add in the extensive program portfolio changes that will be needed in response to this executive order it becomes unreasonable to expect many voluntary changes in accreditor. College personnel can only do so much at one time. Streamline all you want, but if you can’t add hours to the day…