Washington — Accreditors need to make their actions more transparent and better define their roles and responsibilities as assurers of quality in order to gain the public trust.
That was one of the major takeaways from the Council for Higher Education Accreditation 2016 Summer Workshop held here recently.
While the goals of transparency and clarity around the mission of accreditors were lauded, they also seemed elusive, and the conversation sometimes felt—as it has in the past—as if those involved hadn’t quite fully figured out how to achieve those goals.
At the same time, there was also a sense that accreditors will not be able to continue to operate in obscurity, particularly as more situations come to light where institutions collapse or students leave programs laden with debt and little prospects for employment in the field in which they were educated.
In such situations, accreditors will be asked why they signed off on an institution or program that has regularly failed to successfully launch students into their careers, several attendees and speakers said.
“People see accreditors as some level of quality assurance, that it means some type of quality bar,” said James Kvaal, former deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Barack Obama and currently a Towsley Foundation Policymaker in Residence at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
“In part that means that students will get what they expect they’re paying for out of that program,” Kvaal said. “If student goals for that program are partly economic, I think that is part of the expectation.”
