Driving for Change: How Changing Accreditation Is Good for Higher Education
Recently, the U.S. Department of Education announced it was releasing new standards for accreditation. While some of these changes mean increased flexibility for colleges and universities, the new standards also will bring more scrutiny on outcomes. Academia is not notorious for its love of change, but I believe these new changes are actually in line with industry trends.
What the Standards Are
Accreditation is meant to ensure that colleges and universities are delivering on their promise of quality, but standards have not been updated recently. All that is about to change. In November 2015, President Obama issued an executive order around accreditation to help streamline the accreditation process, standardize data and increase transparency.
The new Dear Colleague letter from the Department of Education expands on this executive order. Accreditors, the letter says, should focus on outcomes such as graduation rates, retention rates and job placement rates. It encourages accreditors to focus their resources on lower performing institutions. At the same time, however, the letter says that the federal government will be asking for more transparency among accreditors and will be questioning if certain accrediting agencies have lower performing institutions in the aggregate than other agencies. Understanding the why of accreditation, and enforcing standardization of methodology, will be an increasing focus for the federal government.
What This Means for Institutions
Federal standards are not law, of course, but schools must be accredited for students to be eligible to receive federally-backed student loans. Thus, the federal government’s standards for accrediting bodies can have a significant influence on how institutions conduct themselves. The new focus on outcomes, for examples, will put pressure on institutions to begin measuring (and improving, if needed) outcomes — a trend I applaud.
Institutions have an opportunity to get ahead of the competition with these new standards. The government is making its intentions known, but full changes have to wind their way through Congress, a long process. Smart colleges, however, will start implementing changes now, so when new accreditation standards are released, these institutions already meet, or exceed, the bar.
General Assembly, the coding bootcamp, for example, recently released its framework for measuring student outcomes. For a long time, General Assembly had touted its 99 percent job placement rate as a significant selling point, but questions swirled around how that rate was calculated. General Assembly decided to make its process transparent. Doing so was not in response to government intervention, but it is a selling point in a competitive coding bootcamp marketplace. Most bootcamps share their job placement rates, but now General Assembly can point to its framework as proof of concept, building consumer trust. I am working with Learning House’s coding bootcamp, The Software Guild, to implement something similar.
How to Implement the New Standards
Tracking outcomes is not easy, although it is worth it. First, institutions must consider what outcomes to track. Take, for example, job placement rates. Colleges and universities must define what this means. How long after graduation will they measure job placement — six months? One year? Does a job not in the degree field count as job placement?
Once the outcomes are determined, a process for tracking these outcomes must be implemented. I recommend considering scalability and automation as much as possible. These requirements for data are not going away, so you don’t want your solution to be hiring someone to call graduates every six months and asking them if they have a job. Instead, now is the time to consider building a software program (for example) that can send out automated surveys and then populate a database.
After the systems are in place, institutions need to consider how this information will be conveyed to the public. One of the main focuses of the Department of Education was transparency — it not only wants institutions to have this information, it wants the public to have this information as well. This is actually a good thing for colleges, assuming their outcomes are solid. Students are looking for proof that their investment will pay off, and outcomes such as retention, graduation, and job placement all help make the case for a university. If outcomes are not solid, of course, this provides an opportunity for institutions to identify why that might be and work to improve.
While implementing these new standards seems like more work for colleges and universities, ultimately it benefits institutions. Currently, the market is opaque to consumers. Outcomes data will help higher education function more like the free market, where consumers can make informed choices about the products they want. Competition may increase, which will drive innovation and then lead to even better outcomes.
Not only will outcomes improve, but data will be standardized, allowing consumers to better compare institutions and find a college that works for them. Transparency will be the standard, not the exception to the rule. This will help build trust in an increasingly skeptical population and help prove the value of higher education. Changing accreditation requirements also will help institutions either identify areas of strength and use them as differentiators in the marketplace, or they will require colleges to identify areas of weakness and take action to implement change.
While new standards can feel cumbersome, I believe they will help bring accountability and actually increase the value a college or university can bring to a student. What do you think of the new standards? How do you think they will affect higher education?
