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Accreditation in higher education is an arcane subject.Some might even say a boring one. When I was editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, few reporters wanted to cover the issue.
Trustees I talk with seem oddly interested in accreditation. To them, it’s a risk. Lose accreditation, lose access to federal financial aid dollars. Unless you’re sitting on billions of dollars in endowment, you’ll be out of business in a few months, or maybe if you’re lucky, years. Of course, I always remind trustees that it’s hard to lose accreditation. College presidents, meanwhile, find accreditation a convenient scapegoat for everything they claim they want to do at their institution, but can’t.
What’s most interesting to me is that prospective students and their families rarely pay any attention to an institution’s accreditation—the so-called regional accreditation necessary to access federal aid. If the topic crosses their mind at all during the college search, they’re drawn to a campus that markets its “specialized accreditation” for programs ranging from teacher education to landscape architecture to business schools. This type of accreditation is not required—and although it’s advertised as a way for students to find “high-quality programs”—the requirements that schools need to meet to get specialized accreditation aren’t always clear to the end consumer.
Lately, accreditation has been in the news because two of the leading contenders for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination want to ditch the current system. In announcing his presidential bidin May, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called accrediting agencies “cartels.” Former president Donald Trump a few weeks earlier said he’d “fire” the existing accreditors and create new ones to reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.”
Both Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump have made accreditation a key issue in their campaigns.
How accreditors came to be the de-facto overseer for hundreds of billions of dollars of student aid was seemingly an accident of history.
As we heard on a recent episode of Future U., when Congress passed the Higher Education Act in the 1960s, new streams of federal dollars from the law could only go to students who attended institutions approved by a “recognized” accreditor.
Accreditors were already evaluating colleges, so they raised their hand to do the job. Higher ed leaders favored this solution because accreditors were membership organizations that they themselves governed. It’s kind of like the fox guarding the hen house—much better than having the federal government take on the role.
Our guest on Future U. was Barbara Brittingham. Brittingham is the former president of the New England Commission on Higher Education, also known as NECHE, which accredits more than 200 colleges and universities in the six New England states and 11 American-style institutions abroad.
I first met Brittingham in 2011, when we were stuck at an airport in Riyadh as were making our way to see the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, in Saudi Arabia. I wrote about our travel woes for The Chronicle because Brittingham was part of a delegation who shared their immense knowledge of higher ed that night over the only food we had—chips, an apple, and a banana. I absorbed all their insights that night; it was like a master class. I was reminded of that night as Brittingham guided me and Michael Horn through how accreditors actually operate and why.
The result is what we call a Higher Ed 101 episode of Future U., and it’s well worth your time. This should be a must-listen for trustees, policymakers, and anyone interested in understanding how we ensure quality in higher ed. There’s so much to learn in this episode, including:
Accreditation is about really self-improvement. We tend to think of accreditors as the auditors or the police—in other words, as overseers. But a big piece of the accreditation process is the “self-study,” where colleges turn a mirror on themselves. “The accreditor wants to know that the institution or the program can be honest with itself,” Brittingham told us. “At some level, it’s proof exercise: you have to convince people that you meet the standards.”
Accreditation in the U.S. is different than much of the rest of the world. In many other countries, accreditation is largely carried out by the government because they also directly allocate public dollars to institutions. In the U.S., the federal government sets general standards for the regional accreditors, but it’s up to them to decide how to apply those standards on institutions.
Transparency is not a standard. One of the things about accreditation that frustrates me is how opaque much of the process is. Prospective students should be able to easily access information collected about institutions—what they’re doing well, what they need to improve on, and increasingly their financial sustainability.
The question is whether the current accreditation system is simply protecting legacy institutions and systems.
Brittingham told us that accreditation has “evolved.” She pointed out that NECHE traces its roots back to 1885, when one of its standards was that colleges needed 8,000 books in the library (although it was silent on whether students had to use the books). Later, accreditors started to examine how students used the books, and more recently, there has been a focus on “outcome” standards—do students know how to find, evaluate, and use information, for example.
Sure, accreditation has evolved, but the question is whether it’s evolving fast enough.
Accreditors play a key role in ensuring quality, but in doing so there is tension between innovation and the status quo. When the people running institutions are also the people in essence regulating them, there tends to be a bias toward protecting the status quo—especially when the industry feels threatened as it does now.
Case in point: I recently hosted a salon dinner in Boston for some college and university leaders and the topic of the three-year degree came up. Some institutions want to offer one, but there is hesitation to approve a three-year bachelor’s degree among the college presidents who serve on the NECHE board. They say it’s because a bachelor’s degree should be four years. But they also know that if one institution were to offer a three-year degree it might put even more pressure on their own institutions to follow—and their business models are built for four years.
One reason NECHE was started, Brittingham said, was to better delineate between high schools and colleges and the standards for each. With three-year degrees, competency-based education, dual-enrollment in high schools, those lines are increasingly blurring. Given the high cost of college and the need for upskilling and reskilling throughout life, we need to think differently about legacy credentials—and how they are earned—that have dictated so much of higher education for so long.
Firing accreditors or allowing institutions to accreditation shop outside of their regions (Florida now has legislation on the books that requires institutions to change accreditors at the end of each accreditation cycle) won’t solve this problem. But the federal government needs to hold accreditors more accountable for whether they are really protecting quality and consumers or whether they are just protecting the survival of their own institutions.
🖥️ Next week’s “Next Office Hour” webinarwill explore the results of a comprehensive survey of 2,700 college students about what they want out of the campus experience—from admissions to mental health to job readiness.
Tuesday, June 20 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT
Everyone who registers will receive access to the underlying data and a recording.
Expert panelists include:
Josh Sine, vice president of higher ed strategy at Qualtrics, who will discuss the findings of the survey.
Thomas Chase Hagood, senior associate vice president for academic affairs and dean of undergraduate studies at the University of Utah, who will discuss how to build a seamless student experience.
Bridget Yuhas, co-executive director, Institute for Well-being, and the director of student affairs assessment and strategy at Butler University, who will discuss how to design well-being programs that work and get buy-in.
Andrew Carnegie was a symbol of America’s Gilded Age
Seventeen years ago, I was part of a team at The Chronicle that looked at the “Growing Divide” between the haves and have-nots in higher ed—both among students but also institutions.
As we noted at the time, average spending on instruction per student at the top quartile of colleges grew 37% in the previous decade; at the bottom quartile, it grew by only 6%. Meanwhile, endowment assets per student at the richest institutions grew an amount more than 10 times greater than the growth among the bottom quartile.
Driving the news: I was reminded of this analysis in the last week by three things. First, was another Moody’s ratings report that landed in my email in-box showing the financial divide in higher ed. This raiting action was on Swarthmore College. Just a few excerpts from the note:
“At the end of fiscal 2022, total cash and investments of $2.9 billion covered over 14 years of operations.” In other words, Swarthmore is a college that could lose accreditation and operate for another 14 years!
“Careful budgeting and planning, including prudent endowment spending, will contribute to strengthening EBIDA margins, which we expect to well exceed 20% through fiscal 2024.” Translation: Margins essentially equal profit.
“The college remains highly reliant on investment income, at 55% of the budget, leaving operations vulnerable over time to investment market fluctuations.” Translation: Moody’s might see this as a risk, but where most institutions are dependent on tuition to finance more than 90% of their budgets, Swarthmore is drawing more than half of its budget from investment income.
Some more numbers: The second thing that reminded me of the growing divide was during a talk to the board of College Track, a college access and completion nonprofit co-founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. I mentioned the findings from a recent Bain & Co. study that I helped work on about the financial resiliency of colleges and universities.
The slide below at first didn’t include the number of institutions or students in the left-most bar. The team at Bain added that after two board members at College Track asked how big that group was.
As you can see, the strongest group of institutions—very elite privates—not only got stronger during the pandemic (like every other group thanks to government help), but now are the only group that really has maintained that momentum. But that’s only 51 institutions enrolling just 600,000 students.
One more point: The fourth group of charts (from the left) would likely look different if it only included the 50 or so public state flagships. As Robert Kelchen, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, points out in a Chronicle piece this week, public flagships “are vacuuming up students while their regional-university and community-college counterparts struggle for enrollment.”
He notes on his campus that enrollment is up 6.6% over last year, which required the university to rent a Holiday Inn to house students. Meanwhile, the “University of Tennessee system’s campuses in Chattanooga and Martin are down between two and three percent since 2018, and community colleges are down nearly 20 percent.”
Bottom line: Just like the economic divide in society as a whole, a divide between the haves and have-nots in higher ed is not good for the industry overall. The rich in higher ed often set the narrative making it seem to most Americans that college is difficult to get into and institutions are awash in money yet keep raising tuition. We know neither thing can be further from the truth. At the same time, the nation’s higher ed needs can’t be solved by the haves: the privates in that group are tiny and the publics as bursting at the seams. We need stronger institutions across the board in more than just two small segments of higher ed if we’re going to increase the college-going rate and serve the upskilling and reskilling needs of a workforce that is likely to be reshaped by technology in the coming years.
SUPPLEMENTS
🛠️ The College Search and Skills. On a recent episode of the podcast, The Truth About College Admission, I talked with Rick Clark, who directs undergraduate admission at Georgia Tech, and Brennan Barnard, the director of college counseling at Khan Lab High School, about how the college search is not just about looking for the right fit in a campus and major, but also determining if you will get the skills needed as an undergrad to succeed in the job market afterwards. (The Truth About College Admission)
💳 The Bill Comes Due. “More than three years after student loan repayments were paused due to the Covid-19 pandemic, borrowers will soon receive their first bill since early 2020. Be prepared for when they do…so you’re not faced with an unruly initial payment.” (vox.com)
🏦 The Bill Comes Due, Part II. “About one-in-five student loan borrowers have risk factors that suggest they could struggle when scheduled payments resume.” (consumerfinance.gov)
