Dr. Beno has long been a friend of WCET.  She was active in the governance of our organization when she served as a community college president and has been active with us in her role at ACCJC.  She will join the “Regional Accreditors Address New Guidelines” panel at the WCET Annual Conference in November.  Given the increased interest in the role and responsibilities of accrediting agencies by both Congress and the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE), we wanted to get Dr. Beno’s views on what’s in store for the future.

 

 

Dr. Beno: What an opening question, Russ! American higher education is privileged to be permitted to be largely-self regulating. Higher education professionals have to convince the public that we care enough about integrity and about student outcomes that we will voluntarily engage in activities in which we rigorously review our own quality and make improvements to benefit students and improve institutional effectiveness.

 

One common misperception is that the standards and requirements of accrediting bodies are imposed upon institutions and that they are developed by some others or by the federal government. Accrediting bodies are associations of institutions that have voluntarily joined together to help assure a level of quality among the association’s member institutions. The participation in an accrediting agency’s reviews is a voluntary institutional commitment, albeit tied now to financial aid eligibility. 

 

Accreditation is a process for building institutional capacity for educational excellence. The standards and requirements of an accrediting body are developed with the participation of many representatives of member institutions, and are carefully vetted to all member institutions before being adopted. Granted, the federal government sets requirements that are represented in some standards and requirements, but the majority of standards reflect the member institutions’ best professional thinking about what institutional behaviors are needed to attain educational excellence, they are not externally imposed on the higher education community.  

 

The commissioners, and the team members who evaluate, are volunteer professionals who care deeply about higher education quality and who donate their time, energies, and thoughts to review institutional quality and to provide institutions with good ideas for improvements. Thoughtful, concerned peers who comprise the commission decision making bodies and the evaluation teams are not boogeymen, but are colleagues of all the rest of us working in higher education.

 

Lastly, institutions are supposed to develop their own internal processes for continuous assessment or review of quality, and continuous improvement. Program review, planning, assessment of learning outcomes, and wise use of institutional resources should all be common practices. Accreditors hope that as institutions develop ongoing processes for quality assurance, the accreditor’s review every so many years will become easier for institutions to prepare for – they’ll simply show what they have been doing to assure quality.

 

 

Dr. Beno: When I joined the ACCJC, this commission was just beginning work on student learning outcomes and the assessment of learning. Other regions such as the southern and north central regions had done work in this area for years. This focus has been a major shift in direction for all accrediting bodies over the years, requiring us to include a focus on institutional quality that requires an analysis of learning outcomes, not just student achievement of credits, degrees or certificates. All of the regionals have provided lots of stimulus for institutional capacity development in this area, including special training sessions and workshops, publications on assessment, and new accreditation practices that include collection and analysis of data on student learning outcomes. 

 

Over the last nine years, federal requirements of accreditors have also changed our work. We are now much more conscious of the need to monitor institutional indicators of health through annual reporting requirements. Of course, federal interests constantly provoke changes in accrediting commission practices. The new requirements that accreditors “monitor” some key institutional indicators such as growth, growth of distance education enrollments, growth of additional sites, all speak to a major factor influencing accreditation – the relatively rapid increase in higher education enrollments and the expansion of non-campus based educational practices.  More recently, discussions of the meaning and value of a credit hour is causing accreditors and institutions to examine and clarify policy.  

 

 

Dr. Beno: The amount of federal money spent on student financial aid, now over 100 billion dollars a year, combined with a significant recession, almost dictate a greater Congressional interest in the quality and outcomes of higher education. Combine that with a period in the first eight years of this decade where there was an open window of deregulation that facilitated a significant increase in private, for profit higher education, and you have the recipe for greater Congressional concern. In my view, the rhetoric about accreditors capacity that is coming from Washington needs to be clarified with more information about what accreditors do, and how they carry out quality reviews. We find many people in Congress, or their staffs, who are new to important education committees and may not know enough detail about how accreditation does work, and about why it has been so successful over the years. Regional accreditors, through the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions (CRAC), are working to develop information that provides some clear and basic information. We also work to make improvements in response to Congressional concerns. 

 

I must add that some folks conflagrate the roles of accreditors with those of the federal government and the states. The federal government is supposed to assure integrity in financial aid, and states are supposed to assure overall institutional integrity and stability through their licensing role.   All three parts of the “three legged stool” of quality can always make improvements.  That being said, the regional accreditors and their member institutions believe it important to preserve diversity of educational missions and specified outcomes. Technology focused institutions and visual arts institutions serve different students and different societal needs. The tension between standardization of outcomes and diversity of missions is the issue we are all looking to address in a way that assures and improves quality while preserving a variety of educational missions.

 

 

Dr. Beno: All the regional accreditors have a variety of practices to evaluate the non-traditional learning environment that look somewhat similar. The ACCJC has a ”Distance Education and Correspondence Education Manual” (the 2010 edition is in process and will be entitled “Guide to Evaluating Distance Education and Correspondence Education”) , based on CRAC’s work with WCET, which is used to help evaluators translate evaluative practices to the virtual environment. Our evaluators are asked to sign on and visit classes and support services in advance of a team visit to a campus. We are now developing some specialized team capacity to examine the quality of instructional technologies so that we’ll have greater capacity to meaningfully assess the delivery mechanisms for distance education.

 

 

Dr. Beno: I surveyed the other regional commissions on this matter. Most are using the WCET document in some, albeit altered, form. Both WASC commissions adopted it into policy language on distance education. The ACCJC’s new “Guide to Evaluating Distance Education and Correspondence Education” document uses the CRAC “Best Practices” document.   We also get ideas for it from the Distance Education Training Council and every WCET meeting we can attend!

 

 

I have two suggestions. First, all should know that accreditors are more evidence oriented than ever. Institutions should accumulate and analyze sound evidence of their effectiveness when writing an institutional self assessment. Teams should be given access to all the key evidentiary documents, and increasingly, accreditors want that information available in electronic form before a site visit. Institutions will need to create electronic “evidence rooms” and institutions ought to be thinking how the organization and maintenance of key analytic documents and other forms of evidence of institutional effectiveness can be used by the institution itself to track and make improvements to quality between accreditation visits. There is value in thinking of how to leverage the accreditors requirements for electronic access to institutional information into a tool for ongoing institutional improvement. 

 

Second, the accreditors’ focus on student outcomes – both student achievement of degrees and certificates, and student learning – will likely increase. To date, regional accreditors have asked institutions to define intended learning outcomes, and to assess learning that is occurring, evaluate it and decide whether improvements are needed. Accreditors will ultimately be discussing how they will ask institutions to use that information to set institutional goals or targets. The national discussion of whether there should be common core learning outcomes for any degree recipient is sure to fuel continued interest in supporting assessments of learning.