Is Accreditation the Conscience of Higher Education? And Should It Feel Guilty?

Accreditation can be compared to a litmus test for the quality of a higher education institution. Since the facets of accreditation are many -- from legitimizing institutions to determining eligibility for funding -- should it feel guilty about the strong role it plays in quality assurance? This month we talk with Associate Professor, Kevin Kinser, Ph.D., from the University at Albany, State University of New York about the history, current functions, and the future of accreditation in both the nonprofit and for-profit worlds of higher education.

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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.

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