Dive Brief:
- A first-of-its-kind global survey from the International Quality Group of the U.S. Council for Higher Education Accreditation will be distributed to around 200 accrediting and quality assurance groups around the world to determine what they are doing to tackle corruption at higher education institutions, reports University World News.
- The survey will look at 6 areas of corruption — regulation of higher education institutions, teachers, student admissions and recruitment practices, assessment policies, credentialing, and research norms.
- The aim of the study is to see how accrediting agencies are addressing problems observed in higher education, including issues with bribery in credentialing, plagiarism in publishing and fraudulent research, favoritism in admissions, malpractice and cheating on exams — in an effort to encourage the relevant agencies to crack down on these issues.
Dive Insight:
The higher education industry is changing tremendously with new models of learning from online schools, shorter alternative credentialing options and the merging or closure of several non-profit institutions — with these transitions have come concerns from those within the industry that accrediting and quality assurance bodies may not be sufficiently assessing the quality of certain postsecondary programs. For example, Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall professor, wrote in a recent report that American standards of accreditation are lacking:
“There’s a lot of dissatisfaction with the current accreditation system, in terms of the speed at which it operates and in terms of quality, but moving to a new system will not be easy," said Kelchen, who wrote that colleges and universities are often in danger of losing their accreditation because of increasing financial instability within the industry. He suggests focus on the quality of education, rather than the finances. A global survey to look into the practices of groups within another nations can add to the nation's efforts at revamping its quality assurance processes by observing more instances of success and failure — which can also help them tailor a model that has empirical evidence to back it up.