Dive Brief:
- Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s call Monday for stricter accountability from accreditors follows a history of mixed messages.
- While Duncan strongly criticized accreditors for failing to police the industry, his department last year helped the City College of San Francisco get out of trouble with its accreditor and changed the default rate calculations for 20 colleges at risk of losing federal aid.
- Judith Eaton, the president of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, has said CHEA is working with member accrediting agencies to incorporate outcomes-based assessments into accreditation reviews, but policing college compliance would be complicated.
Dive Insight:
Accrediting agencies see their role in higher education as partners to colleges in their efforts to improve their institutions. The agencies have very general standards and review progress on goals identified by the college itself every few years. Yet even when an accreditor has found a college’s behavior so egregious as to warrant losing accreditation, in the case of City College of San Francisco, the Education Department helped keep it open. Onlookers might say the department only wants to get tough on certain schools, which would make a heightened focus on quality impossible to standardize.
Another notable piece of Duncan’s wide-ranging speech at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County was his support of liberal arts colleges and their programs, and his praise of Vassar and Franklin & Marshall for their diversity efforts. Duncan has largely ignored liberal arts colleges in prior speeches.