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Andrew Hibel, HigherEdJobs: Dr. Kinser, you are an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies, University at Albany, State University of New York, studying for-profit education and also accreditation. Would you explain why you chose these areas of higher education to study?
Kevin Kinser, University at Albany, State University of New York: When I was a graduate student in the early 1990s, I heard about this new thing called the World Wide Web that was going to make traditional universities irrelevant. So I guess I thought that studying traditional universities would make me irrelevant. My dissertation was about distance education, and one of the key debates at the time was how to accredit these new models of learning that didn’t involve typical student-faculty interaction. Actually, that’s still a debate today, it’s just now everyone is familiar with the technology. As I continued looking at distance education, the 800 pound gorilla was actually for-profit higher education. One day I drove past a University of Phoenix campus, and decided I would just stop in and see what they were doing. That was in 1999. I ended up doing a case study of the campus and their faculty training model, and that got me very interested in the entire sector. The link, of course, is that not only do for-profits do a lot of distance education, but they pose significant questions for an accreditation system based on peer-review. Like it or not, accredited for-profits are our peers and that has to be part of the conversation.
Hibel: In your recent work published in the ASHE Higher Education Report: From Main Street to Wall Street: The Transformation of For Profit Education,1 you discuss the background and history of accreditation, focusing primarily on for-profit institutions. Firstly, would you please provide an overview of accreditation in general and the purpose behind it?
Kinser: Accreditation in the United States is a form of quality assurance for higher education. It has been around for well over a hundred years, and originally was established as a way to identify which of the many postsecondary institutions in the country should be considered colleges and universities. This early organization explains another key characteristic of accreditation: it’s non-governmental, in the sense that it is run by colleges and universities as a voluntary membership organization. In other words, institutions can choose whether or not to be accredited. Now for most institutions, that is meaningless, because without accreditation, they have no access to federal financial aid for their students. So that’s another purpose for accreditation — access to financial aid. Since the 1950s, the federal government has relied on accreditation to determine where students can spend their financial aid money. That has always been a controversial role, and it regularly comes up in critiques of accreditation — that it is not performing its role as a gatekeeper to financial aid. But historically, that was not why it existed, and as non-governmental bodies, they often have a hard time adapting to a government defined role.
Hibel: Please describe the differences in regional accreditation versus national accreditation for a college or university. Do these accreditation methods differ if you are a for-profit or a nonprofit college or university?
Kinser: One difference is simply geography. Regional accreditation divides the country into six regions and accredits any eligible, degree-granting institution in the region. National accreditation covers the entire country, and usually has membership criteria that are defined by the academic focus of the institution. Also, national accreditors will accredit non-degree institutions, and regionals do not. There is no difference in accreditation standards or the process of accreditation for nonprofits or for-profits. Each agency may have different standards, but they will accredit any institution exactly the same way, no matter their profit-making status.
Hibel: According to the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), 98 percent of the institutions reviewed by regional accreditation organizations are nonprofit and degree-granting, though these accreditation organizations may also review for-profit, non-degree-granting institutions on some rare occasions.2 Why is it such a rarity that for-profit institutions are not regionally reviewed?
Kinser: Actually, more for-profits are becoming regionally accredited. The latest data shows 105 for-profit institutions have regional accreditation. More than that, because so many for-profits operate multiple branches, probably about 500 separate locations are regionally accredited. So while it’s true that a lot more nonprofit and public institutions have regional accreditation, almost all of the biggest for-profits are regionally accredited, as well as many smaller ones, and the number is going up every year. There are three reasons why more for-profits don’t get regionally accredited. The first is eligibility. A lot of for-profits are non-degree-granting, so they are not eligible, or they are single subject schools, which some regionals won’t accredit. The second reason is that the practical reason for accreditation is access to financial aid. They can get that access through national accreditation, so there is no reason to go for regional accreditation. The final reason is that many for-profits don’t want to go through the evaluation process required by the regionals. Not that it is harder or more rigorous, it just is different and has specific requirements that don’t always match their mission or business model.
Hibel: In a recent USA Today article, “For Profit Colleges Under Fire Over Value, Accreditation,”3 you mentioned that it is estimated “that close to half of all for-profit enrollments today are in schools that have been regionally accredited. The credential serves ‘a legitimizing function.'” Would you please expand on this comment regarding the legitimacy of a for-profit institution being regionally accredited?
Kinser: Accreditation means that the for-profit is a “real” institution of higher education. It is legitimizing in two ways: first, because it serves as notification to potential students that the school is not some sort of fly-by-night operation. Second, it allows the for-profit to associate itself with well-known and respected institutions — we have the same accreditation as the University of Chicago, for example — and gain credit in the comparison. Both forms of legitimacy are important for marketing purposes, which is separate from accreditation’s more traditional quality assurance functions.
Hibel: With the growing rate of for-profit institutions entering the higher education arena, have accreditation standards in for-profit institutions changed over the past decade? If so, how?
Kinser: It’s been an evolution. The thing to remember is that because the accreditation agencies are fundamentally membership organizations, the members determine the standards. So as more for-profits become members, and the longer they are part of the organization, the more their academic models and unique perspectives on education become part of the accreditation expectations. For example, accreditation agencies have developed new ways of talking about faculty involvement in the curriculum and become more accepting of accelerated learning models. That’s not to say that it was all because of the for-profits, but the alternatives that for-profits represent, and the arguments the early pioneers made to the regional accreditors are now accepted as clearly within bounds.
Hibel: I think the nuance that these are membership organizations is an important one. How has membership evolved over the past several years, and more importantly, what has changed about the members’ desire to be a part of the process?
Kinser: The main change, I think, is the inclusion of for-profits as members. That started in the 1970s — before that, all the regionals prohibited for-profits from becoming members. Several for-profits wanted to be members starting in the 1960s, and there were court cases where the agencies were sued because they wouldn’t let them in. With the 1972 passage of the Higher Education Act, for-profits were included in the modern financial aid system. Keeping them out of regional accreditation (and only allowing them to be nationally accredited) wouldn’t hold up. Then, of course, the distance education explosion of the 1990s added virtual universities and other nontraditional institutions (like Western Governors University). This continued the evolution of who was eligible for membership, and therefore, what represented legitimate forms of higher education. I could go on…
Hibel: “For established, stable, accredited institutions, minimum standards are of minimal interest. For accreditation to remain useful to these institutions, the process must have value.”4 What are your thoughts on how well-established institutions approach the accreditation process? Do you think they “go through the motions” or do institutions truly try to improve?
Kinser: I just served on a committee for my institution’s re-accreditation by Middle States, and I can tell you, we didn’t just mail it in. I don’t really have any independent information on how other institutions handle it. From a practical perspective, my institution was never in danger of losing accreditation, so the value of the process was much more about internal mission and thinking about what we had done since our last evaluation, and what we wanted to do moving forward. But honestly, I’m not as interested in accreditation for places like where I work (sorry, Provost Phillips!) as I am in understanding how it works with institutions seeking accreditation who are outside the norm. In those cases, I want to know how the “minimum standards” indicate real quality, and we have simply never thought about alternative ways of achieving the same ends. That’s what I think the best distance education programs of the 1990s showed us, and what the best for-profit institutions today do as well.
Hibel: Separating the nonprofit and for-profit institutions, do you think these sectors approach the accreditation process differently once they’ve become well-established and previously accredited, as mentioned above?
Kinser: That is a really interesting question. I wonder. We have only had regionally accredited for-profits since the 1970s, and not until the 1990s were more than a handful regionally accredited. So I don’t think we have a long enough sample to compare with traditional institutions. For-profits still have to prove themselves to skeptics, where an institution like mine doesn’t have to worry much about that. So I would guess they would have to approach it differently. But what does that mean, really? Do they take it more seriously? Or do they focus on achieving the outcome over the benefits of the process and reflective self-assessment? You may have just given me an idea for my next research project.
Hibel: Where did the idea of “diploma mills” come from, and do you think there are any worries of for-profit universities, either accredited or non-accredited, becoming labeled as “diploma mills”?
Kinser: Make no mistake: This is a serious issue. The book “Degree Mills” by Allen Ezell and John Bear (2005, Prometheus books) is as good of a description of the problem as I have ever read. Everyone should know the warning signs that an institution is offering fraudulent degrees. If a school says you can earn a master’s degree based on your work experience, it’s a degree mill. There is no legitimate degree that can be earned in a few weeks. An institution that refuses to identify its faculty is a degree mill. The only way these scams can exist is because there are people who believe they should have a degree they didn’t earn. States like Oregon have made strong headway in combating the scourge, and the Higher Education Act at the federal level has finally acknowledged the issue in language added in the most recent amendments. This is not a for-profit or nonprofit issue. It is criminal.
Hibel: In a journal article, “Accreditation in the United States,”5 the author states that “Accreditation relies on the candor of institutions to assess themselves against a set of standards, viewed in the light of their mission, and identify their strengths and concerns, using the process itself for improvement.” My question is since it is up to the institution (both for-profit and nonprofit) to assess themselves honestly, do you think this is really happening?
Kinser: I’ll go back to the way accreditation is organized. It is supposed to be a self-assessment and assumes that the institutions involved have a mission that supports quality instruction. This means that if an institution doesn’t care about quality, but only wants accreditation, it would be pretty easy to fake it for the accreditation purposes. I think this is one of the biggest problems facing accreditation right now. It wasn’t set up to ferret out deception. The reason this might apply more to for-profits than nonprofits is that the profit motive can distort the institutional mission away from quality learning outcomes. It’s not just for-profits — nonprofits can get distracted by economic pressures, too. But I worry about those for-profits that have the bottom-line in their DNA.
Hibel: “With $90 billion invested annually in federal financial aid, the government, representing taxpayers, deserves a robust system to ensure that the schools the recipient students attend are of sufficient educational quality.”6 Would you briefly discuss the correlation of accreditation (or lack thereof) in for-profit institutions and federal aid?
Kinser: I have a tough time being brief on this. Any institution that is accredited is eligible for financial aid. The issue is whether mere accreditation should be sufficient to satisfy financial aid accountability. Clearly, it’s not. The U.S. Department of Education through its regulatory power, and the Congress through legislation, have placed a number of requirements on institutions of higher education that are ostensibly about quality, but are more directly about preventing fraud. So for example, we have rules about student loan default rates that evaluate each institution on how its students pay back their loans. The idea is that a better school will have fewer students defaulting on their loans, because they will be getting good jobs based on the quality education they received.
There are all sorts of things wrong with that premise that make it difficult to hang your hat on it as a real quality indicator. However, it works much better if we just think of it as preventing schools from taking advantage of the relatively unrestricted loans available to students to continue their education. Think of it like this: If the government gave out money to people to buy cars, dealers could legitimately sell cars of varying quality. Even a junker can get you from point A to point B, and not everyone needs a Mercedes. What you really want to know about are those dealers who sell the junker for the Mercedes price. Or a rag-top convertible as the perfect family car. Last year’s model instead of a current one. These are obviously wrong practices. But you also want to know about dealers who have a lot of people coming to their lot, who pay their money, but never seem to take delivery of the car. The cars on the lot may be perfectly fine, and those who actually take delivery may get exactly what they want and need. But something is wrong with a business model that can be successful when most of the customers leave empty-handed.
Hibel: As we normally do each month, we like to ask our guest a few questions related to careers in higher education. What would be your advice to someone who is considering working in the area of accreditation either in the for-profit or nonprofit educational sector?
Kinser: Accreditation relies mostly on volunteers to do its work, so the number of paid jobs in the field is relatively small. But it is vitally important work and is necessary to maintain the vitality and independence that are the hallmarks of American higher education. Most people in higher education, however, know almost nothing about it, and really have little idea of how it works. So I would say that anyone who is considering a career in higher education also should learn about the accreditation process for the colleges and universities they may be working in. They should be willing to volunteer to serve on institutional self-study committees and participate on site visit teams, if asked. The standards for any accreditation agency are posted on their website, and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (www.chea.org) also has a lot of useful information.
Hibel: Again, looking at a career in higher education, how do you think the changing accreditation standards could affect a career path in this industry?
Kinser: There are two things going on now that are affecting accreditation. One we haven’t mentioned yet, and that is the international involvement of accreditation agencies. We have more and more institutions opening branch campuses or getting involved in education with overseas partners, and accreditation agencies are deeply involved in making sure these efforts are done with attention to quality. Also, foreign institutions and even some foreign governments are looking to the U.S. quality assurance system as a world standard that further expands the global reach of accreditation.
The second thing is what we have been mostly talking about in this chat: the domestic regulatory process and the ongoing debate about how accreditation agencies continue as key gatekeepers for access to federal aid. Just because the agencies are non-governmental doesn’t mean that they have no obligation to respond to government concerns. It is possible, too, that an agency will decide it no longer wants to be involved in student aid access. That would be a game-changer if it happens. Think of the bureaucracy that would have to be created if the federal government were to take over the oversight role from even one accreditation agency. So as much as accreditation is criticized for its oversight role, we really have no other alternative in this country right now. But because the regulatory structure is in flux, so is accreditation. And higher education itself is changing, both here and around the world, so accreditation has to remain adaptable in an uncertain new landscape.