Why basing college accreditation on outcomes, not inputs, makes sense

Amendments to the HEA have placed a rising burden on accreditors over time. The original 1965 act required only that schools be accredited; there were no requirements for how accreditors should conduct their reviews. The current version of the law specifically details how accreditors should operate, requiring them to evaluate schools across 10 specific criteria. Only one of those criteria pertains to student success and outcomes.

What can Congress do?

In a recent brief, we lay out three ways that Congress can help innovation thrive in higher education. With regard to accreditation, Congress should press accreditors to focus on a range of critical outcome measures appropriate to each school’s mission. Those metrics could include: learning assessments; graduation rates; student employment outcomes; salary growth; ability to repay student loans; return on investment (for both students and taxpayers); and graduate satisfaction.

Accreditors should be encouraged to focus primarily on whether institutions are creating value for students. Schools that do should be given wide latitude in how they do so. Institutions that do not create value for students should be heavily scrutinized.

In December, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce approved the PROSPER Act. The bill, which would update the HEA, would increase the transparency of some accreditation decisions and make it harder for institutions to “shop” for accreditors. Importantly, it streamlines the requirements placed on accreditors and collapses the 10 standards down to one, mandating simply that accreditors focus on “the institution’s success with respect to student learning and educational outcomes.”

This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t give accreditors enough power to use their judgment in evaluating schools. Instead, the bill would allow schools to choose which metrics should apply to them — akin to letting the fox select the locks on the henhouse.

Dr. Barbara Brittingham, President of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education at the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, rightly pointed out in her recent testimony to the Senate HELP Committee that major innovations are underway in higher education. But our current input-driven approach punishes innovation and tolerates mediocrity.

Rather than regulating how schools organize their inputs, Congress should task accreditors with evaluating whether they are achieving desirable outcomes—for students, taxpayers, and the workforce.

This post was originally published on The Christensen Institute’s blog here.