New Scrutiny for College Accreditation Groups

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by AviTerra, Jun 8, 2010.

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  1. AviTerra

    AviTerra New Member

    New Scrutiny for College Accreditation Groups - WSJ.com

    By MELISSA KORN
    Groups that accredit colleges and universities are facing new scrutiny after the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general urged department officials to curtail the authority of the nation's largest regional oversight group.

    The inspector general's office found that the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools granted accreditation to a for-profit university despite what investigators considered the school's questionable practices in awarding credit hours to students.

    The inspector general urged federal officials, in a final report released May 24, to "limit, suspend or terminate" the HLC's accrediting power.

    Officials with the department said they were awaiting a response from the commission before making a decision.

    The HLC has objected to the report's conclusions. Karen Solinski, the commission's vice president for legal and governmental affairs, said it has been working with the department on responding to suggested corrective actions. "We'll see where that process comes out," she said.

    Many analysts doubt federal officials would take such extreme actions as those called for by the report. A loss of governmental recognition could put students at HLC's 1,000-plus schools in jeopardy of losing federal student aid. Colleges and universities need approval from government-recognized accreditors to participate in federal student-aid programs.

    The report comes as the department is pushing for stronger oversight of for-profit higher education amid explosive growth in the sector. Robert Shireman, deputy undersecretary of education, told regulators in April that he feared accreditors didn't have the "analytical firepower" needed to fairly assess schools.

    Colleges and universities pay accrediting agencies such as the HLC to evaluate educational activities, financial stability, governance and administrative structure.

    Mr. Shireman likened accreditors to credit-rating agencies that gave top marks to underperforming securities amid the financial crisis and said the organizations have an "inherent conflict of interest," as they are funded by theeducational institutions they are meant to critique.

    The inspector general's report blasted the HLC for accrediting Career Education Corp.'s American Intercontinental University, even though HLC had previously expressed concerns about the school's credit-hour structure.

    The report said HLC's failure to define what constitutes a credit hour allowed the university to inflate course value and, consequently, award students too much in federal student loans.

    Jeff Leshay, a spokesman for Career Education, said American Intercontinental supports the accreditation process and that HLC's advisory committee found no violations in its recent review of the university.

    Department officials said a newly reconstituted oversight body, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, would help correct problems in the accrediting process. The group has not met for two years because of a holdup in member nominations.

    —Stephanie Banchero contributed to this article.
    Write to Melissa Korn at [email protected]
     
  2. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    Based on their disagreement in the accreditation of a single school, the solution is to terminate accreditation of over 1,000 schools? It's like demolishing a building because there was a broken faucet on the fourth floor.
    This could be a real problem- if evidence could be provided to prove that a conflict of interest has actually manifest itself. If the implication here is true, then accreditors would never turn down anyone, but of course, that is not the case, so where does this speculation come from?
    This is the part that makes no sense at all. Unless AIU is requiring more credits to graduate, the system of determining credit hours has no bearing on the final cost to the student, and therefore, has no bearing in the ammount of federal loans given out.
    A good thing or a bad thing?
     
  3. The_Professor

    The_Professor New Member

    Dang... The silence from the RA Kool-Aid drinking crowd is deafening. Go figure...
     
  4. b4cz28

    b4cz28 Active Member

    This is over one school. Just one AIU....The issue the OIG had with them was fixed before he even looked into to it.
     
  5. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    A comment like that can't lead to anything positive, and I'm not sure why you decided to interject here. There are a few people that can't live and let live, and I have seen some people try to argue against your personal decision in choosing your degree. Please just ignore them, if you are above arguing, and allow a reasonable discussion to occur.
     
  6. The_Professor

    The_Professor New Member

    Chugalug...
     
  7. b4cz28

    b4cz28 Active Member

    It taste good (is it grape?), but so will my Nursing Admin License that takes an RA degree.
     
  8. b4cz28

    b4cz28 Active Member

    Are you talking to me? lol
     
  9. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    No, but you look thirsty. :)
     
  10. b4cz28

    b4cz28 Active Member

    I am, but for the good stuff homie.
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 9, 2010
  11. The_Professor

    The_Professor New Member

    Just hope it's not from the HLC of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. That yummy grape Kool-Aid may just turn into lemonade or even sour grapes should the USDoE's inspector general's office get their way. To otherwise "limit, suspend or terminate the HLC's accrediting power" would kinda suck, doncha know...
     
  12. Chip

    Chip Administrator

    North Central has always been out on the edge. They were the first to accredit distance doctoral programs, and one of the earliest to accredit DL programs. It's no secret that a lot of for-profit schools located in states where NCA has oversight because they have always been perceived as the loosest of the regionals.

    I hope that DoEd does clamp down on them because it seems pretty obvious that they've allowed some pretty shoddy schools. This is why Warren National thought they had a chance; they looked at some of their competition and thought they were in the running. Fortunately, NCA told them to pound sand.

    I don't think any of those who point out the advantages of regional accreditation over DETC are claiming that it's perfect; I've said for years that there are some pretty crappy RA schools out there, most of them in NCA territory. Like Maniac Craniac (and probably everyone else), I don't believe that terminating NCA's ability to oversee schools is the right answer, only because there are probably 99%+ decent schools under NCA's oversight.

    But I do think that some really severe actions against NCA for its lax oversight of the substandard schools -- and putting those schools on probation -- would be a wise idea.

    However, just because one of the six regionals has some sloppy accreditation and lax oversight standards doesn't improve the quality of DETC's process. I would still argue that if you compare the body of distance-based schools accredited by NCA vs those accredited by DETC, and look at academic rigor and other meaningful measures, you'd see a pretty dramatic difference (on the whole) between those accredited by NCA and those accredited by DETC.
     
  13. b4cz28

    b4cz28 Active Member

    I can tell you going from PF to Clovis has been a shock. I have one great instructors and one hard ***. But the thing is I have instructors that are there, that give me feedback and are not shocked when I turn in decent work and they still show me ways to improve. At PF, all my papers I turned in came back with an A and no feedback. There is no way to compare the education I received at PF to what I am getting at Clovis, which is NCA. I know I am only a few days in but I have already turned in a bunch of my work, the perks of no job! I am getting grades back on all my work the same evening if I turn it in the morning.
     
  14. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    It's not possible to make an RA vs DETC judgement based upon comparing two schools. Even if (and I mean IF because I don't know) RA is on the whole a more stringent accreditation, there is still bound to be much overlap in the quality of DETC and RA schools, especially if this RA accreditor is as inconsistent as Chip believes it to be. Now I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that this doesn't turn into another ugly debate :(

    That said, thank you for a preview of Clovis, I'm in the consideration process as to exactly when I will enroll.
     
  15. b4cz28

    b4cz28 Active Member

    This is true, I attended PF and UoA. PF was tolerable. UoA was not and I demanded my money back and filed a complaint with the DETC. I am sure there are some good DETC schools like Aspen. I just think DETC not making schools have an instructors for every class is wrong. PF has like 20 instructors for their 10,000 students. (I made those numbers up btw)

    Less than 2 months before fall semester starts.
    You thinking about the AGS?
     
  16. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    UoA=
    ?
    I'm wondering if I should jump ship with EC and take on a full-time schedule to get the AGS in the fall. Doesn't seem realistic, so I might just stick with plan A, finish my EC AA this month (degree wouldn't be conferred until October :eek:) and use Clovis for some odd credits to transfer into my future BA. If I knew about Clovis last year, I might never have enrolled with EC :)-|).
     
  17. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    That sounds like a difference of opinion. It's hard to know which side is more credible without knowing the details. Just in general though, I'm inclined to have confidence in the accreditors' competency unless and until I'm given some persuasive reason to think otherwise.

    I'm struck by the writer's quick use of the general phrase "a for-profit university" before the school in question had even been named. Given that the current federal administration has never met a union that it doesn't like, and given the faculty unions' passionate hatred for the adjunct-happy for-profits, the conspiracy-theorist in me is wondering if the Obama Dept. of Educxtion might be trying to strong-arm the accreditors.

    Seeing as how it's the accreditor that actually inspects schools and not some Washington 'inspector general', and seeing as how it's unlikely that the government was screening the documents for every one of the thousand or more NCA/HLC schools, I'm wondering whether the Educxtion Department was poring through the accreditors' documentation for the for-profit schools specifically, probably at the unions' behest, hoping to uncover some issue they could use as a club.

    A paragraph a bit further down suggests that my suspicions are likely correct:

    I should respond to this as well -

    The NCA/HLC is a private association of universities. Its "power" to accept members and to publicly list which applicants for membership meet its standards derive from its Constitutional rights of free speech and free association, not from any power delegated to them by the federal government.

    The federal government does administer federal funding and it does have the right to decide who it wants to hire for federal employment. That obviously gives it plenty of leverage. But the "power" to accredit is not the government's to award or to withhold.

    Interestingly, the US Code gives the secretary of educxtion the personal power, individually, of choosing which accreditors he wants to accept for some federal funding purposes. The secretary has a staff to advise him, but he isn't required to heed their recommendations.

    Given that he has the power to personally cut off the student loans for millions of students at thousands of schools across the country, the secretary of educxtion can likely get his way if he throws his weight around violently enough. He just needs a fig-leaf to justify it. He's probably hoping that the threat will be enough.
     
  18. b4cz28

    b4cz28 Active Member

    This all started under bush and has been going on for sometime now.
     
  19. Anthony Pina

    Anthony Pina Active Member

    No it didn't. This situation predates both Bushes. The feds are not going risk the "de-accreditation" of The University of Chicago, Northwestern and over 1,000 other schools. The USDOE does not have the structure to take over the accreditation process. Most likely, the feds will slap NCA on the wrist and cause them to make "reforms". The singling out of a single "for-profit" definitely shows an agenda on the part of both the author and the feds.
     
  20. b4cz28

    b4cz28 Active Member

    Sorry for the confusion I was talking about the AIU issue. You are correct, the will slap them on the wrist.
     

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