Accreditation Experimentation

Discussion in 'Accreditation Discussions (RA, DETC, state approva' started by Kizmet, Jun 21, 2018.

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  1. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  2. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    The same thing they do every night, Pinky....
     
  3. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member

    I like the idea of it. But the map is not the territory. We'll see.
     
  4. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I'd be interested to see where it goes.

    Look, a school cannot under present regulation create a bachelors degree in, say, engineering that drops the liberal arts requirements. Imagine if we could have a 2-3 year engineering degree where you ONLY study engineering. Would it work? Well, it works in the countries where that's what they do. But here we have a roadmap and anyone who tries to deviate from it is denied accreditation.

    We started with zero accreditation. That had many obvious problems. Then we arrived here in over-accreditation. The balance is probably somewhere in the middle. But it's hard to get that pendulum to do only a half swing.
     
    heirophant likes this.
  5. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    Eeeww!

    Apparently they would like the accreditors to place more emphasis on educational results, as opposed to the current emphasis on finances and administrative process.

    "Those recommendations call for, among other steps, restoring a clear separation in the roles of the so-called "triad" that oversees colleges and universities -- the federal government, accreditors, and the states. They also call for giving more priority in accreditor reviews to activities directly related to student experience or quality of education and giving more autonomy to accrediting agencies themselves."

    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/05/23/trump-administration-says-it-will-re-examine-rules-higher-ed-oversight-bodies

    It remains to be seen how any changes work out in practice, but in principle these kind of changes sound very good to me.
     
  6. mintaru

    mintaru Active Member

    And the main emphasis of accreditors should be on educational results. Otherwise, it's educational accreditation just in name.
    I'm sure it would work, but I'm not so sure it's such a good idea. Some on this side of the Atlantic think the liberal arts are an important part of the reason why the US has the best universities in the world, but maybe that's just an excessively idealistic point of view.
     
  7. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    The liberal arts were a good reason why we had some of the best universities. That mission, however, has failed pretty dramatically as we have drifted away from the spirit and intent of liberal arts. You read a biography of Teddy Roosevelt and hear of a young man who struggled to pass Greek and Latin but who thrived in the sciences. A modern day TR wouldn't have struggled. He wouldn't have overcome that adversity. Nope. A modern TR would likely just switch majors to one less rigorous. Or, if he was really committed to that path, would just find a watered down elective that met his foreign language requirements. There are some very good schools out there that maintain that foreign language requirement as they did for decades (or even longer!). But where, years ago, that required a student to learn something they struggled with today there is usually a fluff course that meets the requirement.

    But what does it mean to have the best universities in the world and why do you say we have them? We have some very good universities. But what measure are you using to proclaim that they are better than Oxford? Or any school in the UK, for that matter? Even US News and Worlds Reports challenges your assumption that we're "the best in the world." Best Universities, globally, for engineering?

    Number one is Tsinghua University in Beijing. Number two is National University of Singapore. The US makes the list at #3 with MIT. Then back to Singapore's Nanyang Technical University. Then UC Berkeley. Then Harbin Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, Aalborg (Denmark), Imperial College London and the University of Malaya. Out of the top ten on a US based ranking, the US hits the list twice.

    And I'm not surprised. If I could hire a computer scientist from Aalborg or one from Harvard, I'd go Aalborg all day long. It's very possible to walk out of a CS program from most US based programs without doing very much programming at all. That is absolutely not the case with some of these overseas schools. Typical foreign trained engineer comes to me with a portfolio. A typical US trained engineer tells me about all of the cool student leadership things they did and their fun semester abroad where they learned about "working with other cultures".
     

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