WASHINGTON — As Congress seeks to reform the accreditation system for institutions of higher education, it should avoid a “one-size-fits-all” approach that fails to take into account the varied missions of different colleges and universities that serve diverse student populations.
That was the advice that Dr. George A. Pruitt, president of Thomas Edison State University, proffered Thursday during a two-hour hearing on accreditation conducted by the Republican-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
“It is certainly important that metrics be mission-sensitive,” Pruitt testified. “In the absence of that, metrics tend to assess the demographics of the student body and not the quality of the institution.”
To illustrate his point, Pruitt noted how some observers might disdainfully regard institutions with graduation rates of 20 percent or lower as being “too low.”
“It is too low if your students are going to school full time and expect to graduate in four years,” Pruitt said. “None of the 17,000 in my institution go full time and none expect to graduate in four years,” he explained about Edison, a Trenton, New Jersey-based institution that he described as a “specialty” university that provides flexible coursework for “self-directed” adults.
Conversely, Pruitt said of Princeton University — his institutional colleague “down the street” — virtually all of the students attend full time and expect to graduate in four years.
“To create one metric that you apply across the board to different institutions without regard to the individual mission of the institution or the constituencies they’re serving distorts the picture of both institutions,” Pruitt said. “The dreaded template never works for diverse institutions serving diverse populations.
