Washington, D.C. — Accreditors of institutions of higher education should assume greater responsibility for ensuring student learning, an education professor and author of a provocative 2011 book that slammed universities for lack of academic rigor said Wednesday.
“I’m not blaming accreditation,” Richard Arum, Professor of Sociology and Education at New York University and co-author of “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” told attendees here at the annual conference of the Council of Higher Education Accreditation.
“But you have to assume that the existing accreditation system hasn’t been up to the task of ensuring academic rigor and learning,” Arum said.
Arum spent a good portion of his presentation revisiting some of the key findings of “Academically Adrift,” a treatise that found that disturbingly low numbers of college students were being required to do any substantial reading or writing in their college courses and that, consequently, large numbers of students showed no significant improvement on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, an instrument he described as imperfect but “the best we have.”
He also presented a series of recommendations that accreditors should pursue to turn the situation around. Those recommendations included:
n Ensure that assessments being done at a college allow comparisons across departments. “Because if you allow every unit to come up with their own way of figuring things out, you can’t identify” which programs are doing well and which ones aren’t.
n Check to see if administrators are emphasizing learning and academic rigor. This includes looking at whether they’re making investments based on academic rigor and not just “chasing student-consumers with new dorms, student centers and athletic facilities.”
