Imagining the accreditors that small colleges deserve

I argued recently that small independent colleges must help create the environment in which they can flourish.  This essay takes up one portion of the environment in which small colleges work: accreditation. For most of my career, accreditation was a given: you took the accreditor in your region, and you accepted the standards it put forward.  That is no longer the case, and so it is worth wondering: If an accreditor existed to help small colleges flourish, what would it look like?  Here are six principles which, if embraced by an accreditor of small schools, would make both accreditation and the schools better.

The accreditor should expect small scale

Small schools often run afoul of accreditation standards because they are unable to demonstrate the existence of comprehensive policies or compliance with those policies. That inability often turns on employees with a wide range of responsibilities who are unable to generate the data and reports necessary to show compliance with the policies.  Or it is due to the inability to demonstrate that the institution has sufficient resources to maintain buildings, acquire library holdings, or hire specialists in the academic programs offered at the institution. Even when small schools do successfully meet the expectations of accreditors, they do so by adopting systems, tools, and practices which are not well-attuned to them.

So, an accreditor that assumes small scale would expect structures native to small institutions. Schools might have fewer policies, based on a set of values rather than rules, and applied with wisdom rather than automation.  They might expect employees to be generalists rather than specialists, both at the faculty and administrative levels. They might have less concern about facilities and other wealth-associated measures of campus quality. In turn, accreditors would design an accreditation process that did not require the allocation of large amounts of institutional time and money in order to demonstrate compliance.

The accreditor should expect particularity

Small scale is often the result of an institutional commitment to particularity either in mission or in the students it serves. Most small schools, though, have acted like universities in the past few generations–building out academic programs, services, offices, and amenities that mimic those of much larger institutions. 

This is not to say that accreditors today reject particularity.  It is to say, though, that in the absence of encouragement to focus, schools default to following practices created by larger, more well-resourced institutions. And the financial challenges small schools face are, in part, due to these behaviors. Small colleges are as much a speciality as business schools or nursing programs.  They should be accredited by organizations that encourage their speciality, not assume it to be inadvertent.

If our imaginary accreditor were dedicated to the preservation of small schools, then, it should expect particularity. The curriculum  should be idiosyncratic–dedicated to a particular version of general education and to an array of majors sufficient only to meet the mission of the institution. Pedagogy should be consistent across the curriculum. Services to students and student activities should be narrow, particular, and excellent. In short, small college accreditation should assume that small schools are intentionally so, and assess their effectiveness based on their ability to achieve this intention. 

The accreditor should be designed for innovation

Among the most frequent complaints I hear on small college campuses is that innovation is slowed by accreditors.  This is demonstrably true.  (It is also true that other bodies– faculty, administrators, state governments, the Department of Education, professional organizations–also slow innovation.) Accreditors give significant and slow scrutiny to new academic programs. Major changes to governance structure, the addition or closure of a facility, the establishment of educational partnerships are all heavily regulated by accreditors.  That regulation takes time, and thus innovations are slowed or impeded by the regulatory regime.  And the slowing of innovation at small schools takes away their key competitive advantages–the ability to move quickly and act flexibly.

This is not to say that institutions should be able to do whatever they want whenever they want.  It is to say, though, that innovation should be considered the norm, not a deviation, and that the accreditor should support it rather than impede it. Doing so is particularly important at a time that is ripe for small-scale entrepreneurship.  Accreditation standards designed for innovation should expect curricular change rather than stasis, for instance. They should welcome brief, failed efforts at improvement. They should embrace experimentation in how long it takes students to learn and the conditions under which they learn best. And they should remove the barriers to inter-institutional affiliation and cooperation.

The accreditor should take instructional quality seriously

For at least a generation, accreditors have focused on outcomes as the key measure of educational effectiveness. And in the past ten years, that focus has landed on a narrowing set of outcomes: retention rates, graduation rates, and (increasingly) post-graduation employment and compensation. These are important indicators of educational quality, to be sure. But overwhelming attention to them ignores two facts. First, students as well as their schools have significant influence over these outcomes. Second, employment and compensation have as much to do with a student’s field of study, the economy of the school’s region, the prestige of the institution, and the socioeconomic status of students as they do with the work of the educational institution. To measure the quality of a school by these outcomes, then, ignores key factors that influence them.

Given these challenges, accreditors of small schools ought to give as much attention to instructional inputs as they do student outcomes. To do so is to acknowledge that rigor and quality instruction are in decline, and more importantly, that student learning depends on excellent teaching, clear student expectations, and a level of rigor that urges students to grow. Further, a focus on inputs requires schools to develop and implement a consistent understanding of the classroom factors that lead to student learning in the fields offered at their school. Institutions hold plenty of data on these matters: syllabi, exams, reading lists, and student reports of the time they spend studying, the amount they read, and the number of papers they write, for instance. And they hold data on student use of educational supports–tutoring centers, mentoring, office hours, and the like.  These factors, in addition to key educational outcomes, need to be at the center of the accreditation of small institutions. Failure to place them there puts small institutions and their students at a disadvantage.

The accreditor should share their expertise

Today’s accreditors have access to a tremendous amount of data, and employ people with long experience in higher education.  They are also remarkably reticent about sharing that expertise.  Accreditation staff are happy to give guidance on the technical, procedural components of the accreditation process but rarely on the specifics of compliance. Instead it is teams made up of peers who render decisions about compliance. Peer review has long been the norm for most evaluations of academic quality. But it has significant flaws in accreditation. Review teams are often reluctant to call out obvious weaknesses in the campuses they are reviewing. And when they do, the result is often that behavior at one institution is given a pass while at another it is sanctioned.

My point here is not to criticize review teams. I’ve been a reviewer and I’ve been reviewed and in both roles I’ve been grateful for the members of the review team.  It is to argue, though, that an accreditor dedicated to a particular sort of school develops expertise in what works for that sort of school.  It should be forthcoming about that understanding and aggressive in sharing that information, both outside and through the review process.

The accreditor should advocate for its schools

Accreditors have never been in a more difficult position than they are today. They stand between hundreds of varied campuses and regulators at the federal and state levels.  Because they control access to federal funds, they have the power of life or death for individual schools. They work in a time of significant mistrust of higher education. And they touch on issues–class, race, educational attainment, economic inequity, the difficulty of provoking and measuring learning–that are vexed. The result is that accreditors seem to be working for and against their members depending on the issue and the moment.

Should accreditors become more specialized and serve more coherent categories of schools, one would hope that the ambiguity of the accreditor’s position would diminish. In the case of small colleges, one would hope further that the accreditor would work on behalf of its members, both to improve their practices and to join with them in creating the conditions in which small colleges and the students they serve could flourish.