My thoughts on assessment

Are accrediting organizations in tune with their times?
By Jim Castagnera
The Middle States Commission on Higher Education is making the rounds, conducting a series of regional meetings. I recently attended the one conducted at the College of New Jersey (the college formerly known as Trenton State). The unabashed, unblushing motive of this road show is to stave off efforts by higher education’s critics to shift accreditation standards into the clutches of a Washington bureaucracy.
Standards, the 100-plus attendees from numerous regional institutions were told, will be grounded in “student learning outcomes” assessment. While saying they seek to demonstrate the “value added” aspects of a higher education, the accreditors contended that measuring student achievement --- in terms of subsequent employment and earnings --- should be resisted. That, they claimed, was “too hard to prove.”
In light of recently released data, one might reasonably wonder if Middle States is missing the mark. On February 1st UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute released the results of its 35th annual college-student survey. Fifty-two percent of the respondents listed “graduates get good jobs” as a top reason for choosing the college they are attending. This data point suggests two things. First, the information about where alumni are working must not be “too hard to prove.” Second, our industry’s principal consumers care very much about this piece of intelligence.
Proponents of measuring student learning outcomes in lieu of tracking subsequent student achievement may counter that 63 percent of the freshmen surveyed cited “a very good academic reputation” as a leading motive for choosing their respective schools. They might also note that the current House version of the Higher Education Act’s renewal legislation emerged with an amendment that, if ultimately enacted, will keep the Department of Education out of the accrediting business. Taken together, these facts seem to say the accreditation organizations are on the right track.
Certainly assessing student learning outcomes is an improvement over substituting financial viability as a proxy for academic quality. In my GG cover-story last year (see “Mice That Roar” in the May 2007 issue), I cited Senior Fellow Jon Fuller of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities to the effect that “both federal government and accreditation standards use financial stability as a place-holder for quality education, perhaps because the latter is difficult to measure.”
Directly addressing the tiny, religiously affiliated colleges that dot the Deep South, Fuller added, “What isn’t considered is that many of these schools have been around 100 or 150 years. I doubt that they were ever any less (financially) fragile than they are today. Yet they always have a hard time meeting such standards.”
In the light of Fuller’s observations, I am inclined to join those who espouse student-learning outcomes as a clear improvement over financial stability as the leading indicator of an institution’s right to re-accreditation. In the same breath let me state what the obvious overlap that must exist between the 63% of freshman-respondents who cited “good academic reputation” and the 52% who ticked off “good jobs” suggests to me:
Assessment of learning outcomes is only a halfway house between financial stability and subsequent student achievement. Until accrediting agencies take the next step to measuring alumni employment and earnings data, higher education will continue to offer its consumers a place-holder, albeit a better one than financial stability.