Wyoming Legislator Slams Accreditation

You didn't answer my question. To what does "heel clicking" refer?

 

My own views on this are likely to be seen as having been influenced by my ACU degrees, and so, I must recuse myself from comment. To not do so would be to invite too much noise for me to handle right now. (Noise which, in the past, I may have been hardy enough to endure, but, since my bankruptcy and my wife's having been struck by a vehicle last summer, I am not currently able to endure well enough.)

So, I apologize in advance for not having the fortitude to debate the above statement. (Except to say that, in principle, I agree with it, within certain definitions of "supposed".)

All best.

 

Snapping to attention in obeisance. Military allusion.

What did you have in mind?

 

Hi Russ, would you mind posting the source that lead you to the conclusion that the RAs are fighting tooth and nail against federal standards?

Thanks

 

Have known your wife had health problems but did not know about the auto accident. My prayers are with her and your family.

 

Hi Bill, glad to. One of the sources is on this (degree.net) site. Here it is.

"And so, in April 1993, things were indeed unsettled. The six regional associations were apparently planning to start a new organization to govern themselves, without the participation of the dozens of professional accreditors who were part of COPA. COPA was going about its business, but planning to turn off the lights and shut the door by the end of 1993. And the Clinton Department of Education was busily drawing up proposals that would turn the world of accreditation and school licensing on its ear.

The early thrust of the Clinton/Riley thinking echoed much that had been discussed during the Bush/Bennett/Cavazos/Alexander era: giving increased power to the states to decide what can and cannot be done in the way of higher education within their borders. The big stick wielded by the federal folks, of course, was student aid: loans and grants. The prospect of each state having different standards by which a student could get a Pell Grant, for instance, was daunting.

Around this time, Ralph A. Wolff, an executive with one of the regional accrediting associations, wrote an important 'think piece' for the influential Chronicle of Higher Education: "Restoring the Credibility of Accreditation." (June 9, 1993, page B1) Wolff wrote that, "We have constructed a Potemkin Village in which there is less behind the façade of accreditation than we might like to acknowledge. . . . The accreditation process has not held colleges and universities accountable for issues such as the writing ability of graduates or the effectiveness of general-education requirements. . . If accreditation is to regain some of its lost credibility, everyone involved in the process needs to refocus on standards and criteria for demonstrating educational effectiveness. Even the most prestigious institutions will need to address how much students are learning and the quality of student life at the institution."

Right around the time Wolff was writing, the Department of Education was sending out a limited number of "secret" (not for publication or circulation) drafts of its proposed new regulations. And the six regional accreditors apparently rose up as one to say, in effect, "Hey, wait a minute. You, the feds, are telling us how to run our agencies, and we don't like that."

For instance, the draft regulations would have required accreditors to look at the length of various programs, and their cost vis-a-vis the subject being taught.

A response by James T. Rogers, head of the college division of the Southern Association (a regional accreditor) was typical:

If final regulations follow the pattern in this latest draft, the Department of Education will have co-opted, in very profound ways, members of the private, voluntary accrediting community to serve as enforcement for the department. . . . This is an extremely disturbing abdication of the department's responsibility to police its own operation.

The Chronicle reported (August 4, 1993) that "many of the accrediting groups have sent notices to their member colleges urging them to be prepared to battle the department if the draft is not significantly altered."

And David Longanecker, Assistant Secretary for postsecondary education, was quoted in the Chronicle as saying "Many people in higher education say 'You can't measure what it is that we do, it's too valuable.' I don't buy that, and I don't think most people in America buy that today, either."

The battle lines were drawn or, as the more polite Chronicle put it on August 11, 1993, "Accreditors and the Education Department [are] locked in a philosophical disagreement over the role of accreditation." At this point, the six regional accreditors announced they would be joining with seven higher-education groups to form an organization to represent their interests in Washington. This lobbying group was to be called the National Policy Board on Higher Education Institutional Accreditation, or NPBHEIA. And various subsets of the by-now lame duck COPA were making plans to start as many as three replacement organizations to take over some or most or all of COPA's functions."

 

And, perhaps, grease the inspector as well as the grill.

I don't think you are as at odds with me or russ as it may appear. But I can't speak for russ.

I am reasonably sure that I dislike frauds and phonies as much as you do. Lest this thread go completely off track let me posit that our disagreement lies in how to deal with the baddies and not the fact of there being baddies.

I'd now like to ask you what proper role you see for government in controlling the baddies. What, please, would you have government do and which level of government would you have do.

BTW - Yankee Doodle Dandy that I am, I do believe the onus is on you to justify government control/ownership/interference in any human interactions.

 

Since the case has lawyers involved, I can't comment as to details. I can only say that she was not in a vehicle at the time and was hit directly, without protection. She was badly injured (back, hip, arm) and gets maybe 1 hour of sleep a night due to the pain.

This has been incredibly trying on us all, and is the primary reason I cannot become involved in debating controversial topics. I just don't have it in me anymore. It came just after I was released from bankrupt status and just as we were starting to recover from that.

I thank you for your prayers.

 

Sorry to here of your plight and trust you'll soon see better days.

 

I disagree with your conclusion that it means that "RAs are fighting tooth and nail against federal standards". What the RAs didn't want was the government telling them how to do their job.

Thanks for the information.

 

Libertarian-leaning that I am, I still recognize the need for government in some areas. The acid test: protecting the public.

By the way, I don't care if government does it, or if the education industry itself does it, as long as it gets done. And largely, it does. The rest of this (unaccredited-but-legitimate) is a tiny speck on the educative scene. To most, there are two kinds of schools: accredited and diploma mills. And but for a few exceptions, they are right.

 

I don't think that's accurate. Some professions are regulated and may require examinations, but most aren't. Even when licensing examinations are required, accredited degrees are often required along with exam results as a condition of licensing, so it isn't really clear that the examinations are substituting for the degrees.

But didn't you just get done saying that you aren't suggesting government licensing examinations for every job position? If you don't expect that graduates take exams, then how can you suggest that exams substitute for academic degrees?

It still isn't clear to me what your point is. At different times in these threads you've argued against accreditation in general, against regional accreditation specifically, against academic degrees themselves whether they are accredited or not, and against various state education laws.

Unfortunately your various arguments all have different merit and each one needs separate treatment. You really need to focus.

So apparently you don't entirely reject the idea of academic quality assurance.

So how does your proposed "private agency" differ from an accreditor like the Western Association of Schools and Colleges? WASC is a private agency that conducts ongoing quality assurance evaluations of hundreds of colleges and universities in California and Hawaii.

You seem very hostile to the accreditors, particularly the regional accreditors? Why is that? And how would your own proposal avoid whatever defects that you see in the accreditors?

Are you suggesting that your new agency would perform an entire accreditation review (which normally takes years, requires lots of documentation and includes site visits) every time an employer sent them an inquiry?

Wouldn't it make more sense for the agency to conduct accreditation reviews on its own schedule and then simply publish the results for everyone to use?

How would rubber-stamping mills discredit an unscrupulous "private agency" if we depended on the agency to identify the mills in the first place? Sounds circular to me.

One way would be to place our trust in those agencies that either have memberships that are above reproach or are operated by repected professional organizations. But that's what the accreditors already are.

Another way would be to have the government oversee the "private agency's" activities. To some extent that's what the US Dept. of Education already does with the accreditors, but it might not be entirely comfortable to a defender of laissez-faire.

Each state already has its own education laws. But your point suggests that you might want to limit the number of your "private agencies". It's easy to imagine them multiplying past 50 very quickly. In other words, you probably want a few big ones rather than lots of little ones.

How would you verify which schools are "legitimate" and which aren't from among those schools that currently refuse to submit to external examination by the accreditors?

You could make inspections by your "private agencies" mandatory, but that's just another way of saying that the schools would be forced to become accredited.

Or you could accept that some schools would refuse to cooperate with your "private agencies", leaving us with a set of non-inspected schools loudly proclaiming their legitimacy nevertheless. Non-accredited schools, in other words.

Like Rich already told you, we already have. The system that you describe already exists.

 

Yea, and that is the reason we have the mess we have today. This system is not perfect and you should not have to throw perfectly good unaccredited schools to the wolves (as Rich suggested) to make the system work. His analogy, which does not work, is to compare it to the justice system and where maybe some innocent people get convicted but you don't throw out the whole justice system. The difference is that you also don't knowingly convict innocent people. Here you would be "convicting" them only on the basis they choose not to become accredited. That is not justice.

Even state universities have questioned the need for accreditation and paying $100,000 or more in staff time to prepare for accreditors visits let alone the costs of membership in the organizations. Why even have accreditation for state schools? No one is going to question their degrees anyway.

 

Perhaps those universities recognize the need to be active contributors in the field of higher education, and see the accreditation process as extremely valuable. Again, you cite an example that negates your own point. After all, if state universities value accreditation, who are you to question it?

By the way, almost all accrediting agencies are made up of their member schools. That's how the RA's came to be; schools came together to establish standards of practice for the field of higher education. If this system best serves the industry, why mess with it? (And worse, why substitute a silly, unworkable "system" with one that already works? And why haven't you addressed the very simple questions posed to you about your "system"?

 

Having discovered that voluntarism is Americanism, or, that this thread is using a put-up debate about accreditation as a stalking horse in the service of a political ideology, I'm off this thread. Rich is handling both the ad hominem attacks and the actual education content of the thread quite well--as always. La revedere.

 

russ,

Have you ever actually READ an accreditation handbook from one of the regional accreiting agencies?

I have. Closely. It seems to me that ANY legitimate, financially stable school with anything like adequate faculty, staff, physical location, and library can become accredited. In short, any institution where the student has a reasonable chance to acquire the education he's paying for need not remain unaccredited unless it CHOOSES to do so.

Every school starts out unaccredited. But any school that REMAINS unaccredited or fails even to attain candidacy status within a very few years of opening its doors is suspect. REALLY suspect.

There are CERTAIN situations where lack of accreditation over an extended period can be explained by some feature of the school's program. Certain schools of theology, I understand, deliberately eschew accreditation because they don't think the government has any business inspecting their programs. Certain California law schools are unaccredited because they are distance learning and DETC accreditation isn't worth the expense. In the case of NWCU, they'd have to surrender their J.S.D. program to go DETC, for instance.

But come on, man! the excuses you offer and the arguments you make just don't hold up in the light of day! The BIG reason these outfits aren't accredied is that they want to offer seriously substandard programs leading to misleading credentials.

That is nothing but DISHONEST.

 

You guys are paranoid. Why would accreditation be voluntary if you could not have legitimate unaccredited schools? Why would states even allow a school to open and give it degree granting powers if it did not have some standard of education in mind?

On one hand, you agree that there are some legitimate unaccredited schools and on the other hand you say they are not legitimate because they are not accredited. You can't have it both ways.

 

Somehow, I am not surprised you did not agree with my conclusion. I guess if the feds told the RAs how to do their jobs then those would be federal standards instead of RA standards so you are probably right that the RAs are not fighting against federal standards.

You're welcome!

 

am I getting drawn in?

Turning around your question: why wouldn't a legitimate school seek accreditation to show that it also satisfied the acceptance criteria of an external expert accrediting body? It certainly helps the school attract students due to the wide acceptance of its (accredited) degrees.

About state licensing: in the case of Wyoming and Alabama, the states did not seem to have standards and methods to verify the quality of a school in mind. The true history might be interesting, or it might just be something nobody thought through.

G

 

One very good reason a school would not seek accreditation would be the cost. Still, turning around my question does not answer it.