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"Asking Too Much (and Too Little) of Accreditors November 12, 2010 By Anne D. Neal When it comes to accreditation, what hath Congress wrought? Does even Congress know? These questions come to mind as Senators prepare for more hearings on the for-profit higher education sector. According to news reports, they are enraged by for-profit colleges' abusive business practices. They blame accreditors for allowing fraud to flourish and for permitting institutions to persuade unprepared students to take out federally financed student loans. These students then predictably drop out, burdened by debt. Share This Story * Bookmark and Share * E-mail * Print Related Stories * Misrepresenting the GAO December 20, 2010 * Sweating Bullets at the GAO December 17, 2010 * Gunfight at the For-Profit Corral December 10, 2010 * Accreditation Revoked December 8, 2010 * Looking Ahead to 2013 December 3, 2010 FREE Daily News Alerts Advertisement Senators want to know why accreditors haven't protected the public interest. And their frustration is hardly surprising, given some of what we've seen. But are the accreditors to blame? Hardly. Congress shouldn't blame accreditors: it should blame itself. The existing accreditation system has neither ensured quality nor ferreted out fraud. Why? Because Congress didn't want it to. If Congress truly wants to protect the public interest, it needs to create a system that ensures real accountability."

"Accreditor Takes a Tougher Look at Sales of Colleges By Eric Kelderman Before 2008, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools had a reputation as an accreditor that allowed flexible standards for the burgeoning for-profit education industry, which has rapidly attracted both students and the federal grants and loan dollars they use to pay tuition. But this week, the regional accreditor, which counts many of the largest for-profit education companies among its members, showed that it was serious about changing that reputation. On Wednesday, the commission announced that it had denied a request to transfer the accreditation of Dana College, a small, religiously affiliated college in Nebraska, to a group of private investors that had said it would buy the college and save it from financial ruin. At the same time, the commission rejected a similar proposal for Rochester College, in Michigan."

"Another College Is Sold to a For-Profit May 24, 2010 Lambuth University, a Methodist institution in Tennessee, announced Friday that it has agreed to be sold to private investors, but declined to name the group that is taking over the institution. A week ago, the university said that if it failed to reach a deal by Friday, there was a danger of closure and of failing to meet payroll. Assuming the deal goes through, Lambuth will be the latest example of a financially struggling private college agreeing to be bought out by a for-profit group. Just two months ago, a new for-profit company bought Dana College, a Lutheran liberal arts institution in Nebraska. Share This Story * Bookmark and Share * E-mail * Print Related Stories * Union Push in For-Profit Higher Ed May 24, 2010 * Comparing Higher Ed to Wall Street April 29, 2010 * Pushback on Gainful Employment April 22, 2010 * Going Ahead With Gainful Employment April 21, 2010 * Unnatural Acts April 8, 2010 FREE Daily News Alerts Advertisement The statement announcing the sale said that "President Bill Seymour told the board that this was the best proposal Lambuth has received throughout its year-long process of searching for a suitable partner." The statement also said that the university should be able to submit documents about the shift to its accreditor, the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges, in time for a June review of the change in ownership. Transfer of accreditation from a regional accreditor such as SACS is typically a key enticement for for-profit entities considering the purchase of a private nonprofit college. While changes in ownership subject colleges to an additional accreditation review, such a shift is generally considered far easier than starting from scratch to earn initial accreditation. Some critics charge that these accreditation shifts are a serious loophole in oversight of higher education and that a purchase of a

"The Measuring Stick Finale: A Hawk and a Skeptic Walk Into a Bar … December 21, 2010, 12:38 pm By David Glenn As promised, this blog will expire with the calendar year (cue violins). In this last post, I've tried to distill some fundamental arguments about assessment and accountability in higher education. I've borrowed liberally from comments that readers have left here and elsewhere on The Chronicle's site. Many thanks to all of you for reading and arguing. Of course there are more than two sides to these debates. In that respect, what follows is pathetically reductive. But I've tried not to put my thumb on the scale on behalf of either of these characters. I've tried to convey the strongest cases on each side of an admittedly-crudely-drawn line. (If I've failed to do that, you should of course call me out in the comments.) The scene: Friday, 7:45 p.m. A bar on the outskirts of a moderately selective public university. The décor and the jukebox appeal to disillusioned 36-year-old faculty members and a few graduate students. The fraternities leave this place alone. Accountability Skeptic: Did you see that memo from the dean today? He's hired some consultant to teach us how to "design learning outcomes" for our students. I can't imagine a bigger waste of time and money. And I don't think the dean even believes in this stuff himself. I think he's just trying to keep the accreditors off his back. Accountability Hawk: Don't be so cynical. Tuition and fees here have gone up by more than 50 percent since 2000. Students are taking on miserable levels of debt to be in our classrooms. They deserve to have faculty members who are focused on their learning-and that means that we need some kind of common understandings in our departments about the knowledge and skills students are supposed to be picking up. Skeptic: Listen. I do focus on my students. I assess their learning every week. It's called grading. I get the feeling that the dea

"More Than Bridgepoint on Trial March 11, 2011 WASHINGTON -- Given how the latest in U.S. Senator Tom Harkin's series of hearings on for-profit higher education unfolded on Thursday, Andrew S. Clark, CEO of Bridgepoint Education, Inc., had to be glad that he and his lawyers decided he shouldn't appear at the session, which focused on the exploits of his publicly traded company. Sylvia Manning, president of the regional agency that accredited Bridgepoint's Ashford University, probably wishes she too had found an excuse not to attend. The hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions was framed as a "case study" of how for-profit colleges have embraced online education to fuel explosive growth and drive large profits, and Bridgepoint (the case study, in absentia) and for-profit colleges in general took a lot of hits from Harkin. He at one point called Bridgepoint "a scam, an absolute scam." But while the career colleges were Harkin's primary targets, as they have been throughout his yearlong examination, accrediting agencies and, to a lesser degree, state and federal governments, absorbed plenty of collateral damage. Harkin, for one, made it clear that he believes many accreditors lack the expertise to keep tabs on the increasingly complex operations of the biggest for-profit colleges, and warned that "something has got to change" if the agencies -- as the federal government's subcontractor on assessing institutional quality -- are to continue to grant colleges access to federal financial aid. "Many of these for-profit education companies are becoming multi-state corporations, and their main focus is becoming their bottom line rather than their students," the Iowa senator said during an exchange with Manning. "The question I would ask is, in their current state, are our accreditation agencies equipped to oversee billion-dollar, multi-state corporations?" As is common on Capitol Hill, he didn't wait for her answer, providing

"January 17, 2012 Investors Backed by Publishing Giant Team Up With Calif. University to Start a Bilingual College By Goldie Blumenstyk A $100-million investment fund backed by the German publishing and media giant Bertelsmann and the endowment for two Texas public university systems is jumping into higher education with two ventures aimed key markets. One is a new bilingual college aimed at Hispanic students, in partnership with an affiliate of Chapman University. The other is a new London-based distance-education company that will assist European universities in creating, marketing, and managing online courses and degree programs. For the yet-to-be-named Hispanic-serving college, the new fund, called University Ventures, will form a partnership with Brandman University, an 11,000-student nonprofit institution now known for serving working adult students at its 25 campuses in California (plus one in Washington State) through online and face-to-face courses. Once known as Chapman University College, it was separately accredited from Chapman three years ago and renamed for a benefactor, the Brandman Foundation, in April. Gary Brahm, Brandman's chancellor, said his institution has a good record in serving and graduating Hispanic students, who make up more than a quarter of Brandman's enrollment. (It claims a six-year graduation rate for students, all of whom now enter with at least 12 credits, of 68 percent.) The new partnership with University Ventures presents a chance "to do something very significant in higher education and to do something very significant in California," he said in an interview on Monday. The program will be aimed at the many students from Spanish-speaking homes who have learned enough English to graduate from high school but either are too intimidated or too inadequately prepared to get through traditional college programs taught fully in English. "This has the opportunity to significantly improve their success," he said. Together, Unive

"January 24, 2012 Colleges Can Take 4 Steps to Assure Quality, Group Says By Dan Berrett Increasing the percentage of college graduates in the United States has become a collective aspiration of policy makers, advocates for higher education, and President Obama. But this push for quantity will mean little if colleges cannot demonstrate the quality of the degrees they confer, says an advocacy group. The group, the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, released today a set of guidelines it says will help colleges assess and improve student achievement and, in the process, better demonstrate the quality of their offerings. The guidelines are being presented at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation's annual meeting in Washington, with endorsements from 27 organizations, chiefly accreditors and associations. The guidelines stake out four broad principles of assessment and accountability for a college to follow: setting ambitious goals for the outcomes of undergraduate education; gathering evidence about how the institution is faring in pursuit of those outcomes; using that evidence to improve learning; and sharing the results. The essential idea is to clearly articulate and make intentional the objectives that guide student learning, said David C. Paris, executive director of the alliance. "That's our goal," he said, "an evidence-based profession." The alliance was started in 2009 by several higher-education leaders and foundations to respond to growing calls for accountability in the sector. The assumption was that colleges needed to define how they would substantiate student learning-or lawmakers would do it for them. The new guidelines expand on the alliance's previous efforts, including a statement of principles to guide student learning, which were released in 2008, and a pledge by more than 100 college presidents to take steps at their institutions that are largely identical to the ones set out in the new guidelines. O

"January 8, 2012 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 1 Photo illustration by Bob McGrath for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market. Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of "badges" to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain-intentionally so-to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom. At the free online-education provider Khan Academy, for instance, students get a "Great Listener" badge for watching 30 minutes of videos from its collection of thousands of short educational clips. With enough of those badges, paired with badges earned for passing standardized tests administered on the site, users can earn the distinction of "Master of Algebra" or other "Challenge Patches." Traditional colleges and universities are considering badges and other alternative credentials as well. In December the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will create MITx, a self-service learning system in which students can take online tests and earn certificates after watching the free lecture materials the university has long posted as part of its OpenCourseWare project. MIT also has an arrangement with a company called OpenStudy, which runs online study groups, to give online badges to students who give consistently useful answers in discussion forums set up around the university's free course materials. But the b

"Venture Fund for Traditional Colleges January 17, 2012 - 3:00am By Doug Lederman The space between nonprofit and for-profit higher education gets a little more crowded today. University Ventures Fund, a $100 million investment partnership founded by a quartet of veterans of the for-profit and nonprofit education sectors, is the latest entrant in a market that aims to use private capital to expand the reach and impact of traditional colleges and universities. The fund, whose two biggest investors are the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG and the University of Texas Investment Management Company, is focused on stimulating "innovation from within the academy," rather than competing with it from the outside, David Figuli, a lawyer and partner in University Ventures, said in an interview Monday. The projects will include helping institutions expand the scale of their academic programs, re-engineer how they deliver instruction, and better measure student outcomes; the first two investments, also announced today, will be creating a curriculum through Brandman University aimed at improving the educational outcomes of Hispanic students, and a company that helps universities in Britain and elsewhere in Europe deliver their courses online. "Most of the attempts to bring about innovation in higher education have come from people trying to buy their way in," Figuli said, citing the many takeovers of traditional institutions by for-profit colleges over the last decade (quite a few of which he helped engineer). "Our way is to find good ideas within the existing institutions and fund those." Figuli, a former general counsel for the South Dakota and Montana university systems, said he and his partners don't buy the critiques of traditional postsecondary institutions as unimaginative or fearful of change. "I've been in higher education for 30-some years, and most of the nonprofit institutions I've worked with have been frustrated by the fact that they're capital-constra

"September 5, 2010 Why Teaching Is Not Priority No. 1 By Robin Wilson With lavish recreation centers and sophisticated research laboratories, life on college campuses is drastically different from what it was 100 years ago. But one thing has stayed virtually the same: classroom teaching. Professors still design lessons, pick out the readings, and decide how to test-in many cases, in the same way they always have. In the last few years, however, a cottage industry has sprouted up in academe to measure whether students are actually learning and to reform classes that don't deliver. Accreditors now press colleges to show that they are teaching what students need to know. And as the Obama administration packs more money into student aid, it wants more evidence of educational quality. But a roadblock may emerge: faculty culture. Not because professors care little about quality or students-indeed, many care deeply-but because of what colleges tell them is important. "Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning," says Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California. "I get promoted for writing lots of articles, not for demonstrating learning outcomes.""

November 5, 2010 71 Presidents Pledge to Improve Their Colleges' Teaching and Learning By David Glenn Making a public vow is a time-honored way to stick to one's commitments. If you tell your colleagues that you plan to stop smoking, you know that they'll smirk if they spot you lighting up six months later. In August, 40 American billionaires said they would give away at least half of their wealth. They, too, know that they'll be scorned if they fail to deliver. Now 71 college leaders have made some vows of their own. In a venture known as the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability, they have promised to take specific steps to gather more evidence about student learning, to use that evidence to improve instruction, and to give the public more information about the quality of learning on their campuses. The 71 pledges, officially announced on Friday, are essentially a dare to accreditors, parents, and the news media: Come visit in two years, and if we haven't done these things, you can zing us."

"December 12, 2010 Student Learning: Measure or Perish By Kevin Carey For the past three months, The Chronicle's reporters have been writing a series of articles collectively titled Measuring Stick, describing the consequences of a higher-education system that refuses to consistently measure how much students learn. From maddening credit-transfer policies and barely regulated for-profit colleges to a widespread neglect of teaching, the articles show that without information about learning, many of the most intractable problems facing higher education today will go unsolved. Failing to fill the learning-information deficit will have many consequences: * The currency of exchange in higher education will continue to suffer from abrupt and unpredictable devaluation. Students trying to assemble course credits from multiple institutions into a single degree-that is, most students-frequently have their credits discounted for no good reason. That occurs not only when students transfer between the two- and four-year sectors, or when the institutions involved have divergent educational philosophies. A student trying to transfer credits from an introductory technical-math course at Bronx Community College to other colleges within the City University of New York system, for example, would be flatly denied by five institutions and given only elective credit by three others. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, by contrast, would award the student credit for an introductory modern-math course acceptable for transfer by every CUNY campus, including Bronx Community College-except that BCC would translate that course into trigonometry and college algebra, not technical math. Students who emerge from this bureaucratic labyrinth should be awarded credit in Kafka studies for their trouble. Credit devaluation, which wastes enormous amounts of time, money, and credentialed learning every year, is rooted in mistrust. Because colleges don't know what students in

"The Measuring Stick Finale: a Hawk and a Skeptic Walk Into a Bar … December 21, 2010, 12:38 pm By David Glenn As promised, this blog will expire with the calendar year (cue violins). In this last post, I've tried to distill some fundamental arguments about assessment and accountability in higher education. I've borrowed liberally from comments that readers have left here and elsewhere on The Chronicle's site. Many thanks to all of you for reading and arguing. Of course there are more than two sides to these debates. In that respect, what follows is pathetically reductive. But I've tried not to put my thumb on the scale on behalf of either of these characters. I've tried to convey the strongest cases on each side of an admittedly-crudely-drawn line. (If I've failed to do that, you should of course call me out in the comments.) The scene: Friday, 7:45 p.m. A bar on the outskirts of a moderately selective public university. The décor and the jukebox appeal to disillusioned 36-year-old faculty members and a few graduate students. The fraternities leave this place alone. Accountability Skeptic: Did you see that memo from the dean today? He's hired some consultant to teach us how to "design learning outcomes" for our students. I can't imagine a bigger waste of time and money. And I don't think the dean even believes in this stuff himself. I think he's just trying to keep the accreditors off his back. Accountability Hawk: Don't be so cynical. Tuition and fees here have gone up by more than 50 percent since 2000. Students are taking on miserable levels of debt to be in our classrooms. They deserve to have faculty members who are focused on their learning-and that means that we need some kind of common understandings in our departments about the knowledge and skills students are supposed to be picking up."