In recent years, Judith S. Eaton has worked behind the scenes, mostly, to persuade the nation’s major regional accreditors to accept rising calls to hold colleges more accountable for their academic outcomes.
This week, however, Ms. Eaton, who is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, delivered a very public message to those groups: Embrace change or be swept away by its tide.
At the opening session of the council’s annual meeting, bluntly titled "The Future Is Now: Where Is Accreditation?," Ms. Eaton told attendees that they must consider demands from the public and policy makers to hold low-performing institutions more accountable, using concrete measures of student achievement such as graduation rates, and considering issues of price and student debt.
"We know we are talking about change that is outside of our comfort zone — things that we’ve not done before or are in contrast to what we are used to doing," she said on Tuesday morning. But people in accreditation "have to at least attempt to engage such change," she said, in order to be "effective in serving students and society in the future."
But it’s not clear that accreditors, in particular those that approve a majority of two- and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions, are ready for those changes.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Accreditors-Feel-the-Heat-but/235103