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[Used with permission from Chronicle of Higher Education - formal notice at end. Orginally published on July 7, 2000]
Accreditors Revamp Policies to Stress Student Learning
Agencies say they are responding to years of complaints about regulations and paperwork
By BETH McMURTRIE
Ask college officials about their last visit from a regional accreditor, and they gripe. It's tedious. It doesn't tell them anything they don't already know. It focuses on meeting the most basic standards of quality.
Also see: "We were just grumbling," says Paula Lutomirski, associate vice chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles, about U.C.L.A.'s 1989 review. "We produced this two-inch-thick document, and I don't even have it on my shelf, because it's not worth having." Accreditors, who have heard those complaints for years, are responding with serious changes in the way they do business. All six of the regional associations will have rewritten their standards in the next two to three years. In the process, they may end up redefining what it means to be a university.
Among the key changes: placing more emphasis on what students learn, and less on how they
learn it; accepting the growth of part-time faculty members; developing ways to evaluate the
effectiveness of distance learning; letting colleges tailor the accreditation process to their concerns.The regionals embrace those changes with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But all are becoming less concerned with how colleges are structured and more focused on what kinds of graduates they produce.
"There has to be room for more than just the traditionally organized, faculty-centered, research-oriented university or liberal-arts college in today's landscape," says Ralph A. Wolff, executive director of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities.
Several forces are pushing the regionals in that direction. The federal government, which accredits the accreditors, is demanding more proof of student achievement in accreditation reviews. New technologies are reshaping the creation and delivery of courses so rapidly that the regionals say they must adapt their standards or risk becoming irrelevant. And complaints from colleges about the accreditation process have reached a fever pitch.
But some observers worry that in their efforts to become more flexible, the regionals are abandoning their regulatory function.
"I don't know how they're going to tell the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly," says Jane V. Wellman, a senior associate with the Institute for Higher Education Policy. "Like it or not, the old standards helped accreditors reach judgments. When push came to shove, they had things that could stand up to litigation and politics."
The changes in accreditation standards are in many ways subtle, largely because the regionals use vague language that can be applied to different types of institutions. Still, there are a few clear trends.
For one, the new standards will be much less prescriptive. Western leads the pack in this area. In addition to removing a requirement for a core of full-time faculty members, the new standards will no longer demand a minimum of 45 semester credits in general education. And they will allow an institution to merely provide access to "information resources," such as books, rather than actually hold them on-site, paving the way for entirely electronic libraries.
At the same time, new standards are placing more pressure on institutions to measure what students learn. Western's standards, which will be formally adopted this fall, put full responsibility on the faculty for that task.
The North Central Association of Colleges and Schools has taken a different approach and designed an alternative model of accreditation. The new model, which was introduced this spring, replaces the once-a-decade self-study and visit by an accreditation team with a form of continuing analysis.
The Academic Quality Improvement Project, or AQIP as the new model is called, is also much less prescriptive than the traditional accreditation review and more focused on measuring results. And it comes complete with its own vocabulary. The accreditation process is now described as a "quality journey," and standards have been replaced by "quality criteria," such as "Valuing People" and "Understanding Students' and Other Stakeholders' Needs."
Through the AQIP process, colleges decide, in goal-setting workshops, how to meet those broad mandates. The goals must be approved by North Central, but the emphasis is on developing effective systems and processes, not on meeting minimum standards.
Guided by North Central's hand-picked experts, an institution submits an annual "results inventory" that demonstrates its performance under the various quality criteria. Every seven years, the institution is reaccredited through "a simple validation process," according to North Central, "resting upon an institution's pattern of continuing involvement in AQIP."
John Jasinski, one of the AQIP designers and an associate provost at Northwest Missouri State University, says his institution has used a similar form of self-assessment for nine years. By continually evaluating how the university performs various functions -- from leadership to teaching -- the faculty and administrators "have a clearer idea of what students and employers are looking for," Mr. Jasinski says. Among the improvements he says resulted from the new system: an increase in faculty salaries and benefits, and higher scores on the national Praxis exam for students seeking teacher certification.
North Central and Western represent the extremes of what the regionals have proposed, and it is not clear how closely the others will follow them. The Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges, for example, rejected a proposal in 1996 to get rid of one standard that requires a core of full-time faculty members. Sandra Elman, executive director of the association's Commission on Colleges, says the issue will come up again when the standards are reviewed in the next year or so. But, she says, she continues to believe that such a core group is necessary to maintain a high-quality academic program.
One thing all of the regionals seem to agree on: Measuring what students are learning will continue to gain importance. By focusing on results, rather than counting heads and library books, the regionals say, they are holding colleges accountable while giving them the flexibility to experiment with new forms of education, such as Web-based courses or partnerships with for-profit institutions.
The Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, for example, has created new draft standards that replace the term "faculty" with "faculty and other professionals," to acknowledge that more colleges are using course materials designed outside of the campus, says John H. Erickson, deputy executive director of the association's Commission on Higher Education.
The new language, he says, "is a way of reminding the institution that it has a responsibility for everything carried out in its name, whether it's a program developed by its own faculty or developed elsewhere."
Critics warn, however, that removing traditional measures of quality opens the door for questionable institutions to gain accreditation, and dysfunctional ones to keep it.
The number of full-time faculty members, the amount of time students are in class, the size of the library, and the types of governing policies -- those are all objective indicators of a solid academic program, critics say. If such baseline measures are ignored, accreditation becomes a subjective process of judging "effectiveness."
"The nasty policing function of the accreditation process will perhaps be badly compromised," warns Jack Schuster, a professor of education and public policy at Claremont Graduate University and a critic who served on a committee that helped draft the new Western standards. As an example, he notes that the language covering the role of the faculty in governance has been changed from a requirement that it be "substantial and clearly defined" to a more vague statement: "The institution's faculty exercises effective academic leadership."
"The language is much more general and subject to an interpretation that would not require substantial faculty participation" in governance, Mr. Schuster says.
Accreditors say critics are missing the point: By measuring results, not resources, they are forcing institutions to deliver the goods. If a college chooses mostly to hire part-time faculty members, for example, it must prove that they're an integral part of the institution.
Accreditors also argue that they are not abandoning their regulatory function. Steven D. Crow, executive director of North Central's commission on higher education, says the new AQIP process will be open only to institutions for which "basic standards are not an issue." He doubts that a college with serious financial or governance problems will even be interested in the process, because it will demand much more time and effort than a traditional review. And he notes that if a participating institution fails to demonstrate a serious commitment, North Central retains the right to kick it back into the old accreditation-review process.
Mr. Wolff, of the Western association, also says the new results-oriented standards will be more stringent than the old ones. He believes it is appropriate to allow higher-education institutions to organize themselves however they wish, as long as they prove that students are learning. It may be impossible to run a solid institution without full-time faculty members, he says, "but in this age of new forms and new modes of delivery, we should at least allow institutions to make the case."
Mr. Wolff says he's done his share of due diligence, running the new standards past dozens of member institutions to see if there were any major objections. He even asked the chairmen of three accrediting teams that had penalized institutions if the new standards would have changed their decisions. They said no.
At its most elemental level, the debate the changes has evoked revolves around a single question: What is the purpose of accreditation? To the federal government and the public, accreditation ensures that an institution meets minimum standards of quality. But accreditors say they'd rather be advisers than policemen -- a stance that has led critics to charge that accreditors are toothless.
"We've never liked to view what we've been doing as being regulators," says James T. Rogers, executive director of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which is now rewriting its standards. "All of us want to be part of helping to build a strong system of higher education and not be viewed as impediments to that."
The regionals began the reform process several years ago, by allowing colleges to focus their internal accreditation reviews, commonly known as self-studies, on areas they needed to improve. Typically, colleges must have received strong reviews in the past to be allowed to do this.
The option has drawn varying degrees of interest. At Southern, Mr. Rogers says about 90 of 520 institutions up for reaccreditation in the past six years have opted for a tailored self-study. He attributes the low number to a stringent screening process that requires an institution to submit a proposal to a 12-member team for review.
Western began experimenting with its self-studies in 1997; about 25 of 75 institutions reviewed since then have participated.
U.C.L.A. undertook a tailored self-study in 1998 and focused on three broad areas approved by Western: general education; student and faculty diversity in the wake of Proposition 209, California's ban on racial and ethnic preferences; and how well the institution used "performance indicators," such as graduation rates. An accreditation team then assessed U.C.L.A.'s self-study and advised the university on how it could improve its performance.
Ms. Lutomirski, the associate vice chancellor, says the accreditation team gave U.C.L.A. a much-needed reality check on the issue of racial diversity. "We were wringing our hands [over Proposition 209], and they said, 'Get off it. You need outreach, you need to look at the breadth of your academic programs,'" Ms. Lutomirski recalls.
Chand R. Viswanathan, a professor of electrical engineering, was vice chairman of U.C.L.A.'s Academic Senate at the time. "I had gone through accreditation previous times, and all you do is count the number of courses and what kind of requirements they satisfy," he says. "When you really look at it, all these things are already worked out in an ongoing institution."
The new process, he says, focused on U.C.L.A. officials' real concerns "and helped them reach their goals faster."
Other changes proposed by the regionals have met with more caution. Measuring results -- or "outcomes" -- may be the primary example. The regionals are encouraging colleges to use more and different kinds of measurement tools, such as audits of students' work, to examine how their writing and critical-thinking skills improve over time. Many institutions, however, have resisted such efforts and continue to rely on traditional measures of success, such as student-, alumni-, and employer-satisfaction surveys.
Faculty members frequently dislike the idea of measuring what students learn. Some say it's insulting to think that student-satisfaction surveys are more meaningful than grades. Others believe outcome measures are helpful, but worry that the regionals are emphasizing them at the expense of more-important measures.
"You lose the forest and look at the trees," says James E. Perley, chairman of the accreditation committee of the American Association of University Professors. "It's like determining tenure on the basis of the number of publications a person has produced. If you use that as your only criterion, you can end up with a pretty weird faculty."
Supporters of outcome measures think critics are too hasty in dismissing what they consider a valuable tool for self-improvement.
The University of New England, in Biddeford, Me., has already made changes in its curriculum as a result of efforts to measure student learning, says Paulette A. St. Ours, associate academic dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. The department of social and behavioral sciences introduced a freshman seminar that outlines the department's expectation for majors after it discovered that students felt little connection to the department during their first years.
The University of the Pacific, in Stockton, Calif., has embarked on a similar program to measure student achievement. Marisa Kelly, a political-science professor, says her department added a capstone course for seniors to test their knowledge and analytical skills. It revealed weakness in both areas. As a result, the department is placing more emphasis in all courses on developing research skills and has added a course on democratic theory, on which students were found to be particularly
weak.The regionals acknowledge such efforts are difficult, and are trying to provide some guidance. The New England association, for example, is in the middle of a project to develop concrete measurements of students' progress. "Millions have been spent by thousands going to hundreds of assessment workshops," says Charles M. Cook, director of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges' Commission on Institutions of Higher Education. "And you need a microscope to find the stuff."
Mr. Cook doubts the old accreditation rules will completely disappear. But the new results-oriented approach is helpful, he says, when traditional definitions of higher education no longer apply.
How the Regional Accreditors Are Changing
MIDDLE STATES ASSOCIATION OF COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS: Revising standards to focus on student learning and other measures, such as the quality of student services. Will publish proposed changes in October.
NEW ENGLAND ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES: Developing better ways for colleges to measure student learning. Will do a complete review of standards in two to three years.
NORTH CENTRAL ASSOCIATION OF COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS: Began alternative accreditation process this spring that replaces the 10-year review with continual self-analysis by colleges.
NORTHWEST ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES: Drafted revisions in eligibility requirements to require evidence of student achievement and institutional effectiveness. Changes must still be voted on by the group. Revisions of standards to begin this fall.
SOUTHERN ASSOCIATION OF COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS: Revising standards to make them less prescriptive and more focused on measuring results, such as student achievement. Will publish proposed changes in December.
WESTERN ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES, COMMISSION FOR COMMUNITY AND JUNIOR COLLEGES: Plans to revise standards in 2001. Considering an alternative accreditation process similar to North Central's.
COMMISSION FOR SENIOR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES: Approved revised standards this spring that simplify the compliance process and stress evidence of student learning. Final version to be adopted in November.
Proposed Changes by One Accreditor
The Western Association of Schools and Colleges' Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities recently approved a new version of its standards. Here are some of the changes, which will be formally adopted this fall.
New Old LIBRARIES "The institution holds or provides access to information resources sufficient in both scope and kind to support its academic offerings and the scholarship of its members." "The institution provides services and holds readily available basic collections at all program sites not serviced by the main library." FACULTY AND GOVERNANCE "The institution's faculty exercises effective academic leadership and acts consistently to ensure both academic quality and the appropriate maintenance of the institution's educational purposes and character." "The role of faculty in institutional governance is both substantial and clearly defined." STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT "The institution's expectations for learning and student attainment are developed and widely shared among its members.... The institution's faculty takes collective responsibility for establishing, reviewing, fostering, and demonstrating the attainment of these expectations." [No explicit statement about the faculty's responsibility for student achievement.]
Copyright (c) 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Posted with permission on site. This article may not be published, reposted, or redistributed without express permission from The Chronicle. To obtain such permission, please send a message to permission@chronicle.com. For subscription information, send a message to circulation@chronicle.com. The chronicle home page is at http://chronicle.com. Original article at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i44/44a02901.htm (subscription to Chronicle required to access original).
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