Cracks Showing in 100 Year Old System

http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/15/accredit

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

It was 1911 when the US Department of Education (then known as the Bureau of Education) last tried to publish a list that stratified or ranked higher institutions according to how their college graduates performed in graduate school. This report was suppressed by both Pres. Taft and his successor, a professor himself, Pres. Wilson. It has not been attempted since. Any meaningful comparisons, no doubt, will run into the same dead end. (cf. David Webster in Hist. of Ed. Qtrly, 1984, 499-511.)

Numerous other cross-cutting tensions threaten to tear this agenda apart: the fact that faculty quality standards have been left up to the accrediting guilds for so long (resulting in a massive out-of-field instructor problem here in the South, especially Florida’s community colleges); the misalignment between association guild-goals and the US DOE’s fiduciary duties (never fully addressed in HEA 1992); the irrelevance of learning outcomes for the credential markets (it is not what students learn, but where students go, that matters); and the fact that institutional mission statements are largely rhetorical constructions.

Cracks are beginning to show in the century old “accreditation movement,” whose origins can be found in progressive era reforms, the survey movement, Taylorism and the standards movement. Most prominent, aside from its dependence on the naturalization of higher education in general, and the rise of American credentialism in particular, are its guild characteristics, the protection of privilege and member benefits. Clearly, a system of self-regulation that is 800 years old has outlived its usefulness. We wish the Secretary luck in reforming it.