National Accreditation Gets Slammed

Rich: How long ago was the DETC given approval for the pilot doctoral accreditation project? And how long ago was the DETC granted an expansion of scope by the USDE to include the accreditation of professional doctorates?

 

Oh no! Please accept my apology, Abner, if you thought it was directed at you! It wasn't directed at you in any way, shape, fashion or form! You've always been a delightful poster!

 

Thanks for sharing that. I was unaware that a change had occurred within the last year.

 

No need to apologize. Sorry I took it the wrong way.

Have a good one.

Abner

 

National Accreditors such as DETC made more progress during the last decade then got slammed.
I would like to mention the following:

The Academic Excellence Review Committee of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) unanimously voted June 11 to recommend to the THECB that the Accrediting Commission of the DETC by formally recognized under the provisions of Texas Law.

 

The statement that Florida Community College at Jacksonville and most Florida public institutions won't hire instructors if they don't have a SACS-accredited degree is not only false (check the faculty credentials online at Florida State or U of Florida), it's silly.

Does the author really think that a public community college in Florida wouldn't jump at the chance to get a faculty member with a Harvard, Columbia, or Stanford doctorate? I'd bet the house he meant to say a regionally accredited degree.

Having said that, I used to teach for an ACICS-accredited school, and quit after less than a year. The general preparation of the students was just atrocious, and I sometimes felt more like a grade school teacher than a college adjunct. I was making a small fortune, but I actually felt guilty cashing the checks, so I quit. I don't ever regret my decision.

 

This is a bad article naively written with many errors. The confusion between National Accreditation, For-Profit institutions, SACS accreditation teaching requirements in Florida, and the general tone represent the worst type of junior journalism possible concerning this topic. The concept of “check your facts” seems lost on this journalist and paper.

I wonder which Florida B&M this want to be journalist graduated from? Probably says more about the program at that school than anything else.

Boo!

http://journalism.org/resources/principles

 

http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/people/adamaasen/

Says he graduated from Indiana University. If this article is an example of the quality of graduates they produce, then clearly their journalism program doesn’t teach the basics, or he somehow managed to sneak by without learning them. Or he chooses not to apply them for some reason here.

 

Yes, I agree. DETC has made great strides, and makes more every year.

Abner

 

no fundamental difference between the two

There is no fundamental difference between the two forms of accreditations. Both are conducted by non-profit associations established by consent of a group of institutions. Both accreditations are based on the principle of voluntary application by an institution, both are institution-wide in scope, and both use peer reviews to judge whether an institution meets published standards of academic quality and institutional integrity.

DETC enjoys the precisely same national recognitions as the regional bodies do, and DETC has the same kind of accreditation standards which address curriculum quality, faculty qualifications, student services, and ethical and business practices.

There are some interesting differences: DETC is expert in distance learning technique and specializes in accrediting distance education instruction. It has over a half century of experience in doing this. DETC evaluates institutions completely every five years, while regional accreditation is conducted once each decade. Between five-year reviews, DETC does a comprehensive subject specialist curriculum evaluation of every new program before students may enroll, while the regional associations do not.

But at the core, the accreditations are very similar, and both are virtually identical in philosophy and scope of activity. To term one more acceptable or better than another is not at all accurate.

Will the credits a student receives from a DETC-accredited institution be accepted by a traditional college or university? What dictates this?

There is never any guarantee any accrediting association can offer that a student's credits will transfer to another institution. This is because each institution reserves the right to make its own decisions on which credits to accept and which to refuse. Sometimes, a regionally accredited college will reject DETC institution credits based on the fact that the institution where the credits were earned is not regionally accredited.

The fact that some regionally accredited colleges refuse to accept credits from another school solely because it is not regionally accredited flies directly in the face of national policies advocated by American Council on Education (ACE), the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), et al. The real issue here has less to do with the academic quality of the sending institution, and more to do with anti-competitive business practices of the receiving institution. Competition is heating up in higher education, and there are forces at work to control the inroads being made by "upstart" operators. Congress, the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice have been looking into this anti-competitive practice by higher education, and we suspect we will see significant activity in the coming months on this matter.

I know first-hand the quality and the rigor of the academic degree programs of the DETC institutions. Each DETC institution program is evaluated by several professors who teach at regionally accredited institutions. These professors are asked to respond to over 200 questions about the programs they are evaluating. There is no question that at the end of this process, the DETC program is comparable to the quality and rigor of a similar program offered by a RA college.

So, when you look at the reasons provided by a college for rejecting DETC credits, "That it is not offered by a regionally accredited institution," the reasons boil down to prejudice, ignorance or anti-competitiveness. Or better put, it is the result that the receiving institution person simply does not accept DETC accreditation as being legitimate, despite what the Secretary of Education or CHEA has decided.

The challenge DETC graduates face in transferring credits is to convince the receiving institution that their academic work is truly legitimate. I am happy to say that of the DETC graduates who try to transfer their credits, about 70 percent are successful today. This percentage will continue to increase as the hundreds of thousands of DETC institution alumni are able to convince skeptics that DETC accreditation is a "real" accreditation, and that people can place their faith in it.

More details read an excellent article by Accreditation Guru by Michael Lambert posted on this website; http://www.military-advanced-education.com/article.cfm?DocID=2040

Lastly, Congress doesn't believe one is better than the other. See HEAAmendment2007 that congress passed prohibiting regional accredited schools from this form of discrimination.

 

It seems redundant to have two accreditation agencies that are exactly the same. Since they're the exact same, then we can go ahead and drop DETC (aka national accreditation) and fully embrace regional accreditation. Thanks you kindly for the insight.

 

Odd biased suggestion. A better suggestion would have been to merge them all into a single accrediting entity, if you are being serious.

 

I think that it's a serious question. If it's true (I don't believe it myself) that there's no difference between DETC/ACICS and the regional accreditors, then why do DETC and ACICS even exist? What's their function, what ecological niches are they occupying?

If it's true that these accreditions don't always receive the same recognition as the regionals, and if it's really true that they demand just as much from their applicants, then why would any schools choose to pursue accreditation through them?

 

For that matter, why have six regional accrediting agencies with seemingly-arbitrary geographic boundaries?

 

Yes Mr. Lady, I was being somewhat humorous. I actually agree with Bill Dayson's insightful post.

I really don't understand the hubris about why DETC proponents seemingly want to tear down regional accrediting institutions. You can buy a GM or a Toyota; the choice is yours. You can also pursue DETC or regional accreditation; the choice is yours. Caveat emptor: but don't demand that Toyota honor that GM warranty; and similarly, don't demand that the regional accreditors recognize DETC accreditation as being equivalent to (or the same as) regional accreditation.

 

I’m not going to chase this, it has been chased enough. I can’t take the time to educate the masses here. However, the thing that amazes me is that so few people actually understand how things got to where they are, or why RA is seen the way it is seen. If you understand the history, understanding where things are heading given current trends is pretty easy.

However, to the automobile analogy, I think it goes to the heart of the problem. The argument isn’t over who will honor whose warranty, that’s silly, the argument is over agreement that they both produce cars.

 

Good comments Dave. I am glad visionaries like yourself are at the forefront of such issues. The composition of NA issue keeps changing each year. This is something that is good for all concerned with education. In another 2-5 years things are going to change even more dramatically. Why? The public demands it. Many on this board swore THECB issue would never change. But guess what? It did. They (and Texas) were wrong plain and simple. THECB victory is symbolic for various reasons. The most important in my mind is the perception change. No longer can the anti NA crowd say: "Oh, but NA degrees are illegal to use in Texas, so that is all the proof you need!". Wrong. They were wrong, and the perception they created was wrong. Also, the media no longer has fodder for stories.

On a positive note, the stumbling block is gone, and perception is changing. Perception is often created. Now DETC is becoming more proactive in molding the perception of their agency. The introduction of doctoral level degrees makes this mission more pronounced. I would suspect DETC will become more politically aligned, and thus more powerful. It does not hurt that DETC's HQ's are in Washington. Of course, the fact that every year more and more schools are accepting DETC credits greatly helps as well.

Now to address some side issues. There will be some leftover legal issues for some to deal with next year. THECB issue caused some unpleasant ramifications. Unfortunately, I cannot say more on this subject. I will say I am glad to see aggressive stances being taken. The tables have turned my friends. Hell yes!

In closing. There will always be someone who will try to knock anothers accomplishment. The holder of a B&M degree will knock a holder of a DL degree, etc. It all seems rather silly. Our focus should be on the betterment of all educational issues. Being proactive is not being defensive.

Abner

 

Abner, well said back in the day when I went to nursing school at (then) the University of the State of New York (Excelsior College), nursing professors and instructors in the state I lived in said such a form of nursing education would never be equated with B&M schools of nursing. Now look at how much has changed in nursing education since the early 70s. Time will replace the NA/RA accreditation issues…don’t think so, some of my old nemeses that said nursing couldn’t be taught that way are instructors for online nursing programs today.

 

I don't think that the general public is aware of any of this. If you ask a typical person, he or she probably has some vague idea that accreditation exists, but they don't know what it is exactly. It's whatever all those universities that they have heard of have. Since the universities that people are familiar with are almost always RA schools, most people just kind of assume that RA is accreditation. They don't usually know that anything else exists.

DL doctoral programs represent a real opportunity, but only if DETC schools are able to recognize and seize it.

On the doctoral level, I don't think that accreditation matters as much as people think. What matters is academic reputation. The proof of that is the success of Rockefeller University, which does just fine despite not being RA. (It's accredited by the NY State Regents.) If a university or a biotech firm is looking for a newly-minted Ph.D. to fill a professorial or a research post, those doing the hiring will be subject-matter specialists who know all about Rockefeller and the work being done there that's relevant to their needs.

What DETC needs to do is emulate that, even if it's on a modest scale at first. DETC schools that want to be taken seriously as strong graduate schools need to play the same academic game that the RA B&M schools play. They need to start treating schools like Berkeley as their peers and get involved in the same academic conversations. I'd like to see the accreditor encouraging (better requiring) any of its schools with doctoral aspirations to put in research units (institutes, centers etc.) and to install more of a 'publish or perish' ethic.

My point is that DETC schools will start getting more respect when scholars and professionals find it difficult to stay current in their field without encountering work coming out of DETC institutions. DETC schools have to be players. They can't demand the same salaries as the stars without ever going out onto the field.

That's something that bothers me. DETC's management seems to think that they can litigate and legislate their way to academic and professional respect. But that's not how it works.

It doesn't matter how madly DETC thrashes around. As long as a significant proportion of the people who have even heard of it continue to perceive it as a bunch of small proprietorial schools with limited resources (and occasionally iffy histories) that couldn't get RA accreditation if they tried, busily offering undemanding 'earn a degree in your spare time' courses to all comers, the respect that DETC receives isn't going to be growing very quickly.

So what DETC needs to do is change that perception. They can do that by becoming players. They can do that by showing intellectual life. They need to leave their vocational trade-school roots and be perceived as the universities that they desperately want to be.

When that starts to happen it will be a victory not only for DETC, but for all of DL.

 

Hi Bill - This is a great post. I think that most people on these boards would be happy to see DETC schools step up a bit and make a move to the next level. However, there's one way in which they are hampered from doing this. Since they are only allowed to offer professional doctoral degrees, it's unlikely that they're ever going to attract the kind of student who is willing to "publish or perish." You can look at a kind of hybrid as an example. There are schools that are RA but offer professional doctoral degrees. How many of those grads publish after they've gotten their degrees? What's the percentage of DBAs or PsyDs who've published articles in scholarly journals after they've gotten their degrees? I'm betting that it's not many. So, do the DETC schools have to be better than the RA schools in order to be considered "as good?" This is a little like the female professionals who had to be better than their male counterparts in order to be considered as equal to their male counterparts. It might be unreasonable to expect that DETC schools are going to establish research divisions (that no students care about) just so that maybe, just maybe, somewhere down the line, the people in charge will allow them to offer research degrees. That's a multimillion dollar gamble. No one would ever take that risk. I would prefer to see a set of small pilot projects where a screened group of applicants was allowed to pursue research oriented doctoral degrees (PhDs). Maybe one of the requirements would be like what they do in the South African programs; you must create two articles, of publishable quality, while you're on your way toward your PhD. Start small, build on success, prove you can do it and then gradually expand the programs. These schools haven't even really proved that they can do professional doctorates yet. Have any of them even gotten their degrees yet? DETC programs have gained a lot of respect over the recent years. I think they'll get where they want to go but I'm guessing that it will need to happen in small stages and they'll need the cooperation of the entire acrediting system to get there.