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Printed from YorktownPatriot.com Opinion A conference on accreditation conducted by the American Enterprise Institute on Friday, September 21, brought together an audience of college administrators, accrediting association representatives, and journalists.
The role of government in attempting to reform higher education accreditation became of concern when a little known appointive body at the U.S. Department of Education issued warnings to three accreditors. One regional accrediting association governing the West coast of the United States was admonished for not reporting assessment measures of its members. The American Bar Association was directed to explain why it was pursuing diversity as a mandate for accreditation of law schools. And the American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) was advised that the Secretary of Education would be asked to approve a recommendation that AALE not accredit new institutions until it demonstrated that its member institutions were collecting evidence demonstrating student learning.
It was ironic that a few months after telling AALE that it wasn’t measuring learning outcomes the Department of Education began a “rule-making” process to define what assessment measures should be imposed on all institutions of higher learning. AALE was sentenced before it was given a definition of the rules it was supposed to enforce.
The effort to impose assessments (testing) for learning outcomes in a top-down process was doomed to failure, however. After one ‘rule-making’ session, negotiators (chosen by the Department of Education) closed down the rule-making process by using Parliamentary procedures. No rule-making, no top down rules to impose. And that was only the beginning of the higher education Establishment’s efforts to throw back the ‘reform’ efforts of the U.S. Department of Education. Within a nanosecond of receiving appeals from major colleges and universities in their states, powerful members of Congress became engaged. A member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee inserted language in a spending bill that directed the Department of Education not to spend any funds on ‘rule-making.’ Then a ranking member of the Senate education committee inserted language in the Higher Education Act reauthorization directing the Secretary of Education not to take any actions before Congress had deliberated. And that little known appointive committee whose recommendations threatened the all-powerful American Bar Association was slated for dissolution and replacement by a committee controlled by Congress. And members of the president’s own party besieged the White House with telephone calls, letters and e-mail messages asking why Secretary Spellings was federalizing higher education.
The reaction to the attempt to reform higher education by threatening to revoke charters of accrediting associations compelled the Department of Education to back off from the imposition of new rules and to ask the higher education Establishment to develop its own assessment measures.
Despite the failure of an unprecedented, ham-fisted, attempt to force a program of national testing on every college and university from the top-down, higher education institutions and the accrediting associations that accredit them were given notice that powerful political appointees had taken notice that some reforms were absolutely necessary.
But, what kind of reforms?
Had Secretary Spellings thought things through and analyzed the situation instead of shooting first and aiming later she might have encountered some ideas expressed by her Commission Chairman, Charles Miller at the AEI conference. Despite Charles Miller’s admiration for a National Industrial Policy approach usually associated with Democrats, he is also capable of independent thinking. And that’s what he gave his audience on September 21.
In a speech titled “Accrediting the Accreditors,” Mr. Miller outlined a critique of the accreditation process that is seldom heard in Washington, DC. Accreditation, he argued, is a process that embodies group thinking where “Go along to get along” is a way of life. The accreditation process is financed by members (those regulated), governed by members (those regulated) and exists not to assure academic quality but to act as gatekeepers, Miller said, for federal tuition assistance. As such, the accrediting associations have life or death authority over colleges and universities and none dare to criticize what, Miller said, was ‘a structure ripe for abuse.’ In a process defined by conflicts of interest chartered accrediting associations have inordinate influence over new entrants into the education marketplace. The whole process is averse to competition and could be likened to medieval guilds that—in the name of assuring quality—actually protected guild members from competition. This system, Miller said, is ‘quaint and out of date’ and in a summary of the evils the accreditation process embodies, Miller stated that accreditation is a barrier to:
1) real change; 2) educational opportunity; 3) competition; 4) productivity; 5) attracting capital to higher education innovation.
Innovation, Miller said, is most important and the situation called for new concepts of structure, the application of new technologies and new educational models.
Well, if that wasn’t a powerful indictment of higher education accreditation, I don’t know what is.
Miller’s general accusations were also supported by Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Alumni and Trustees and by the founder of a M.B.A. in Entrepreneurship degree program in Austin, Texas, Jeff Sandefer.
Had Neal and Sandefer’s voices been invited to join the chorus of the Secretary’s Commissioners there might have been a chance that real reforms would result. But, their inclusion on an AEI panel after the dissolution of the Secretary’s Commission and after nine months of acrimony between the Secretary’s ‘rule-making’ staff and every college and university in America was nine months too late.
Besides, what were the reforms that Charles Miller thinks could reform the system of higher education accreditation that he had just indicted?
Miller definitely had an idea he wanted to share. Why not accredit institutions prospectively, he asked.
Miller argued that financing higher education is dysfunctional because venture capital won’t place a wager on an uncertain regulatory outcome. Under current regulatory conditions new entrants must purchase an existing accredited institution and build new proprietary education companies by piggy-backing on the old, dilapidated, carcasses of institutions on the verge of failure. Randy Best, Michael Milken, Douglas Becker and others have built new universities by purchasing accredited institutions. Michael Milken, a convicted felon, purchased two accredited institutions! Asked what he would have to do if he hadn’t begun his M.B.A. degree program using the accreditation of another institution, Jeff Sandefer said it would take him five years and $10 million dollars and no one would put up the $10 million because “a bet on a regulatory gamble” isn’t good business practice.
Prospective accreditation is another matter. An application for accreditation before an institution was ‘fully’ accredited would open a flood-gate of new financing that would shake the foundations of higher education.
If new entrants into the education marketplace didn’t need to spend five, ten or even fifteen years seeking accreditation, the first institutions to collapse would be most of the more than sixty national accrediting associations. Why endure their lengthy and expensive accreditation procedures when you can attain accreditation prospectively? Next would fall most marginal colleges whose raison d’etre was shaped in the long distant past and which now struggle—even with regional accreditation—to survive financially.
The considerable sound and fury of hundreds of new, well-financed institutions, entering the education marketplace with prospective accreditation would introduce competition into higher education, force colleges to lower tuition costs, and compel them to reorganize how they conducted their business. Academic tenure would fall by the wayside as institutions demonstrated to Faculty that the alternative was closure. Students would begin to take most of their courses via the Internet.
Holy Moses! Why didn’t Charles Miller think of that before? Copyright (c) 2006 Yorktown University. All Rights Reserved |