What Administrators Should Know About Accreditation

By Milton Greenberg

Moving Up

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As you move up the administrative ladder, you will become increasingly involved with the world of accreditation. The shrewd administrator will be aware of what it is, how it functions, and how it can be used and abused.

Accreditation is an evaluation process that concludes with the granting or withholding of certification -- a seal of approval that shows an academic program, school, college, or university meets quality standards established by professional peers. The remarkable feature of this process in the United States is that it is done through the efforts of voluntary associations rather than, as is the case in most of the world, by a centralized ministry of education.

Further, those who seek accreditation do so voluntarily. One must hasten to add that accreditation by a federally approved body is usually a condition to receive federal dollars including student financial aid, to have courses accepted for transfer, to get tuition reimbursement from employers, and to have graduates professionally licensed and employed. Obviously, "voluntary" doesn't mean what it seems to mean and puts the importance and substantial authority of accrediting bodies in a somewhat different light. Nevertheless, many postsecondary educational institutions do indeed function without accreditation and attract students.

Accreditation is conferred on entire institutions by regional accrediting bodies (Middle States, New England, North Central, Northwest, Southern, Western). In the case of vocational and technical education as well as many faith-based schools, institutional accreditation is conferred by "national" bodies (for example, the Accrediting Council of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology and the Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges).

The majority of accrediting bodies are "specialized" or "programmatic" and evaluate professional or technical fields of study including law, medicine, and engineering. Specialized accreditation of programs within colleges and universities usually presumes prior institutional accreditation for the overall institution.

Numbers add to the complexity. There are six regional accreditors (two of which have separate accrediting commissions for community colleges and career schools), 11 national ones, and about 60 specialized accrediting bodies. About 2,900 colleges and universities, most of them nonprofit, degree-granting institutions, are regionally accredited. An additional 3,400 institutions have national accreditation -- most of these are for-profit, non-degree-granting, single-purpose colleges, focusing on religion, business, or information technology. In addition, specialized accrediting bodies accredit more than 20,000 programs and some single-purpose schools.

Who accredits the accreditors? An accrediting body is granted "recognition" by the U.S. Department of Education. Its purpose is to assure that accrediting bodies are "reliable authorities as to the quality of education or training" offered by the institutions or programs that are accredited. Colleges must be accredited by a department-approved body in order to receive federal financial aid. For a complete list of accreditors recognized by the department, see its Web site.

Some institutions also seek recognition from the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, a voluntary association of institutions of higher education that serves as a national coordinating body for accreditors. It limits its recognition to accreditors whose membership consists of a majority of degree-granting institutions or programs and emphasizes voluntary quality assurance and improvement. A list of its members can be found on the council's Web site.

If this sounds unduly complex, it is. But it reflects the complex nature of American higher education -- public and private, nonprofit and for-profit, comprehensive and single purpose, secular and faith-based, licensed or monitored by state and national governments but passionately committed to self-regulation and academic freedom.

Who are the accreditors? Simply put, it is you and me, invited by surprisingly small professional staffs in accrediting agencies to be part of a visiting evaluating team or to serve as reviewers of team reports or to make final determinations as to accreditation. Services are performed without remuneration, other than expenses.

Accrediting schedules vary but many accreditors are on a 10-year visitation cycle with a five-year written update report required. The process involves the preparation of a self-study by the institution (usually undertaken a year or more in advance of a scheduled visit), scrutiny by the peer visiting team to validate the self-study's claims and to exercise professional judgment about quality issues, followed by action of the accrediting agency through its peer-review committees.

Accreditation of higher education is not only complex; it is somewhat arcane. By and large most people in higher education know little about the process or the significance of accreditation. The public, too, is uninformed. But the concept of a seal of approval is well understood.

What does this have to do with college and university administration? If you are in a small college, institutional accreditation may be all you require but even a small institution is apt to need specialized accreditation for a few programs such as teacher preparation or a health-related technical program. Comprehensive colleges and major universities will have numerous visits to schedule covering as many as 10 to 30 professional schools, specialized departments, or programs. In such cases the demands on the institution, in terms of time and money, can be enormous. Administrators need to be aware of the accreditation universe to which their institution belongs.

Central administrators (and hardly anyone else) will be concerned with institutional accreditation. When the time arrives for the preparation of a self-study and the arrival of a visiting team, all units of the university, academic and nonacademic, must be energized to participate.

Working with the internal self-study team, the administrator can project and shape the institution's future. In rare instances, a review can result in dramatic changes in personnel, programs, and organization. But few institutions remain unchanged as a consequence of a good self-study or an accreditation report filled with astute observations and analysis provided by neutral observers.

Deans of schools or chairmen of departments who are seeking new or renewed specialized accreditation will continuously be conscious of the requirements of their accrediting body. They will make clear to their faculties and to their administrative superiors what the expectations are and what programmatic and financial consequences are involved.

Central administrators must be sensitive to the concerns of deans and chairmen of specialized accredited disciplines. After more than two decades as a chief academic officer, I find it hard to recall a discussion with a business-school dean or a law-school dean, for example, in which I was not reminded of some accreditation requirement that I would need to consider in budget formulations. I used these opportunities to learn but also to distinguish between the accreditation requirement and the wish list.

Think of institutional or specialized accreditation visits this way: You have important guests coming to evaluate what you do. The expectation is that your self-study is prepared by a representative campus committee of professors, staff members, and students, and involves the trustees in some way. The study includes extensive data regarding enrollments, programs, faculty, finances, and so forth. Narratives of what your college or university presumes to be and how it is working and planning to maintain and improve its product are part of the study as well. If you have 30 accredited units, you will have to do this 30 times over a few years and then start again. That exercise and the anticipation of the visit are enough to affect anyone.

The visiting team will have free access to the campus and its records. It will be on the receiving end of rumors and tales of woe commonly heard from some professors and students. These will be largely ignored by the visitors but it is not unusual for a team to convey to the program, college, or university leadership anything that may appear especially troubling or could affect morale.

The visitors will be concerned with financial status and controls (taking care of business may bore the campus but says a lot about the administration), allocation of resources (it should reflect balance with attention to educational and physical plant needs), program content and quality (the broad professional assumptions regarding higher education and specific research or technology demands of certain professions), student life and learning (the campus and programs must be centered upon the basic mission of educating students for productive lives), and appearances (the campus and your school or department should look well cared for and suitable to serve its clientele).

Be aware, as an administrator, that few if any accreditation visits will end without some "suggestions" for improvement that may affect the campus budget for many years with respect to faculty positions, program alterations, teaching loads, equipment, space, and even new buildings.

From the standpoint of an administrator with a unit under review for specialized accreditation, the visit usually affords an opportunity to seek money from the university in anticipation of the visit or for the purpose of remedying the shortcomings found during the visit. Specialized accreditation accounts in large measure for the favorable conditions of most professional schools in terms of salaries, space, and educational environment as compared with their liberal-arts colleagues. Professors in specialized programs tend to be better informed about accreditation because of the guidance it provides for program requirements and its usefulness as a tool to leverage money out of the university.

Central administrators must balance the demands of specialized accreditors against the legitimate claims of disciplines "unprotected" by accrediting bodies, which is true of most traditional liberal-arts disciplines. It is not surprising that central administrators often greet the requirements of specialized accreditors with hostility. Many administrators believe that specialized accreditation distorts the allocation of resources on a campus and they resent the expenditures involved in supporting a large number of specialized accrediting bodies.

The responsible campus administrator, eager to serve the interests of the university at large, will be aware of the opportunities and limitations of the accreditation process. Whatever its burdens, most leaders of higher education realize that though it may be difficult at times to live with accreditation demands, it is superior to the likely consequences of living without it. Voluntary and responsible accreditation is critical to the preservation of higher education's independence, integrity, and academic freedom. The competent administrator will learn how to use it to benefit his or her institution.

Milton Greenberg is a professor emeritus of government at American University, where he served as provost and interim president. He has also been an administrator at Western Michigan University, Illinois State University, and Roosevelt University in Chicago.