Key Topics

• Markers of institutional quality
• Regional and specialized accreditation
• Program review

Introduction

Two other major types of evaluation that are common in higher education: accreditation and program review. This chapter provides a brief overview of these important evaluation activities. Early in your careers, you will likely only tangentially be involved in accreditation, however, as you must up in the administrative structure, you likely will have more opportunities to be directly involved.

Setting the Parameters for Institutional Quality

In the absence of a federally controlled system of higher education in the U.S., regional accreditation performs the important function of assessing institutional quality. Suskie (2015) identifies five dimensions or cultures that quality colleges and universities demonstrate. These cultures provide the framework guiding the accreditation process regardless of accrediting association:

1. A culture of relevance. Quality colleges and universities, and academic, research, and external outreach programs are responsive to their constituents.
2. A culture of community. A quality college values people and has a culture of community “characterized by respect, communication, collaboration, and collegiality” (p. 27).
3. A culture of focus and aspiration. A quality college or university knows its mission and has a plan for where it is going in the future. In other words, a quality college plans.
4. A culture of evidence. A quality institution collects and uses data routinely to assess progress toward its goals.
5. A culture of betterment. A quality college or university is always striving to be better. (Suskie, 2015, pp. 25-31)

    Each of these cultures has many dimensions that are reflected in and form the basis of the criteria on which peer evaluators assess whether colleges and universities meet basic levels of quality.

Accreditation

Accreditation, institutional and specialized, and program review are forms of expertise-oriented evaluation. According to Judith Eaton, former president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, “Accreditation is a process of external quality review created and used by higher education to scrutinize colleges, universities and programs for quality assurance and quality improvement” (Eaton, Overview, n.d.). Typically, the entity undergoing review writes a self-study demonstrating how it meets critical pre-specified criteria. The self-study is then reviewed and evaluated by a group of trained peer evaluators, typically from peer institutions. Accreditation assures the public that U.S. colleges and universities (and some universities in other countries) meet minimum standards of quality. Professional school, or specialized, accrediting associations do the same for their member schools. Institutional accreditation in the U.S. is voluntary, theoretically at least, and rests in the hands of six regional, private, not-for-profit accrediting bodies. Accreditation affiliation at the institutional level has, heretofore, been based largely on location as suggested by the names below:

• Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association
• Middle States Commission on Higher Education
• The New England Association of Schools and Colleges Commission on Higher Education
• The Northwest Commission on Schools and Colleges
• Southern Association of Schools and Colleges Commission on Colleges
• Western Association of Schools and Colleges
  • Western Association Senior College and University Commission
  • Western Association of Schools and Colleges Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

    The regional nature of accreditation is undergoing a transformation in the face of Trump era regulations allowing accrediting bodies that heretofore had been regional to accredit institutions outside of their historic region (Fain, 2019; Lederman, 2022). Currently, public universities in Florida, for example, are shopping for a new accreditor due to action by the Florida governor’s office (Lederman, 2022). At the time of this writing, it is not clear the extent to which colleges and universities will voluntarily change accreditors. Doing so costs money, time, and effort to meet new criteria. As a result of the unsettled nature of what was formerly “regional” accreditation, I am putting “regional” in quotation marks. So, far the former “regional” associations continue to be the main organizations doing institutional accreditation even though the field has not settled on a new descriptor for them.Specialized accreditation of professional programs is designed and overseen by professional associations.

The Council for Higher Education Accrediting Associations (CHEA) certifies accrediting bodies and provides an excellent set of readings on accreditation on its website. Several of these readings are listed in the reference list. “Regional” and specialized accreditation are more thoroughly described by Linda Suskie (2014) in her excellent book, Five Dimensions of Quality, which I highly recommend as a non-jargon filled, straight forward, introduction to accreditation in the U.S.

A Brief History

Accreditation emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as higher education was expanding rapidly and some standardization and quality control became necessary. As transportation improved, society in general became more mobile, students moved and wanted to take credits with them generating a need to guarantee equivalency of courses from one college to another. It is hard to imagine now, but at the turn of the 20th century there was little standardization of course equivalencies, what constituted a bachelor’s degree, or even a credit hour. Groups of colleges and universities began to cooperate to set standards such as how many faculty members and how many library holdings a college should have to be a legitimate college. The Board of Regents in New York State and the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges located in the upper Midwest were among the earliest groups to develop some quality control standards to define a quality college or university (Brubacher & Rudy, 1976). Over time, the approach to accreditation and the criteria on which colleges and universities are assessed have changed. Early on, colleges and universities had to meet very specific criteria and standards, such as have a minimum number of books in the library or employ a specific number of faculty members with terminal degrees.

Accreditation has transformed over a century to focus on institutional performance on specified criteria in relation to institutional mission with institutional improvement as one objective. No longer do accreditation bodies concern themselves with absolute standards for things like how many books a university must have in its library or the number of faculty it must employ. Rather, an institution is expected to demonstrate that it has a sufficient number of qualified faculty members and learning resources to accomplish its mission.

More recently, regional accreditation bodies have taken (or been given) more federal accountability functions. As such, regional accreditors are responsible for monitoring institutional compliance with federal financial aid and credit hour equivalencies and functions such as complaint and resolution monitoring. Accreditors ensure that a college’s online academic and support offerings are of the same quality as those they offer on ground. Accreditation also serves the role of legitimizing transfer courses and enables students to transfer courses from one accredited college or university to another (Brubacher & Rudy, 1976; Eaton, n.d.; Lucas, 2016). Accreditation continues to adapt to current trends.

A Peer Driven Process

Accreditation is an example of expertise-oriented evaluation that relies on the judgments of trained experts from peer institutions. It is a peer driven process; representatives of the member colleges and universities in each accrediting body develop and shape the criteria and processes by which their members will be evaluated and accredited. Each “regional” accrediting body has its own specific criteria and evaluation process. However, one thing they have in common is that panels of expert peers review institutional performance over a specific period of time as presented in a self-study, supporting documentation, and site visits to campus locations (Suskie, 2015). The self-study is at the core of both institutional and specialized accreditation. (Each accrediting body may use a different name for the self-study.) The self-study, or its equivalent, describes how the institution meets the established criteria and is based on the premise that in the process of studying oneself, an institution will identify areas of improvement and work to make necessary changes. Accreditation is mission driven in the sense that community colleges, for example, are expected to meet the generally accepted norms of what constitutes a quality community college and not those of a private liberal arts college, research university, religiously affiliated private college, or not-for profit college or university.

Voluntary—Sort of

Although accreditation claims to be voluntary, there are significant costs to not being accredited. The federal government uses accreditation to ensure that institutions receiving federal dollars (e.g., research and federal financial aid) meet minimum qualifications. Institutions that are not accredited by one of the approved accrediting bodies will not be able to participate in these programs.

In fact, over the last couple of decades, accreditation has become the primary mechanism used by the federal government to assure accountability. As a result, a more accountability, compliance-oriented approach is slowly displacing accreditation’s emphasis on the ideal of self-study as the way for an institution to identify its strengths and weaknesses and to engage in improvement. Similarly, some specialized accrediting bodies may require institutional accreditation in order for the professional program to be accredited. Likewise, in some states, professionals (teachers, for example) must have degrees from education programs accredited by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). Students who attend unaccredited institutions may be limited in their ability to transfer credits to an accredited institution.

Specialized Accreditation

Professional degree programs are accredited by specialized accrediting bodies. These are national in scope but focus primarily on a single professional program. Examples include nursing, medicine, business, education, social welfare, and engineering. Specialized accrediting bodies follow a similar process to that of regional accreditation, but they have more focused and detailed criteria and processes for accreditation.  For example, specialized accreditation is much more likely to delve into a detailed examination of curricula and specific student learning outcomes. In some fields, professional programs don’t have to be accredited in order to offer degrees, such as business schools, but accredited programs are generally considered to be of higher quality than those that are not accredited. Accreditation is required in many professions.

Some examples of specialized/professional accrediting bodies are:

• National Association of Schools of Music Commission on Accreditation
• American Bar Association
• Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education
• Liaison Committee for Medical Education
• Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)
• ABET (Engineering)
• American Psychological Association
• Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation

Strengths and Limitations of Accreditation

Accreditation has several strengths as well as some limitations.

Strengths

Among the strengths are these:

• It is peer driven. The criteria by which an institution or professional program is judged are determined by organizations comprised of representatives from the member institutions involved. Likewise, visiting teams that read and assess an institutional self-study, visit the campus or program, and render a judgment include trained reviewers who are faculty members and administrators at similar types of institutions. In other words, whether or not a college or university is deemed worthy of accreditation is determined by trained experts who are familiar with the institutional type.
• Institutional accreditation is mission and normatively driven. Although all institutions in a region, regardless of type, are evaluated on the same criteria, individual college and universities are judged by the extent to which they exhibit practices that adhere to the specified criteria, mission, and norms for a particular type of institution. This is what is meant by “mission driven accreditation.” For example, community colleges and research universities must demonstrate achievements on the same criteria, but they will not be expected to do so in the same way. Community college faculty members will not be expected to do research, for example, nor will they all be expected to have a terminal doctoral degree. They will be expected to carry out functions in keeping with the community college mission generally and for their specific college.
• Engaging in a self-study process can be beneficial to an institution or a particular program. The preparation process offers a college or university an opportunity to pull together accomplishments over a number of years and to reflect on them. The self-study process can also, if a college or university allows it to do so, identify problems that need to be fixed. This is extremely important to the continuous improvement objective. As one accreditation official once told our self-study team: “If an institution has a problem and doesn’t acknowledge the problem, it has two problems—the original problem and the fact that it doesn’t know it has the problem” (Lootens-White, HLC officer, personal communication). Needless to say, the feedback from peer review teams can also be very helpful. Such feedback can provide specific recommendations and can also provide external “clout” to help a college or university achieve a goal that may be difficult to obtain without external pressure.
• Institutional accreditation assures that accredited colleges and universities receiving federal student loan and research program support meet certain standards of quality and transparency. As an example, most regional and professional accreditation standards and processes seek to assure that students are taught by qualified faculty who are routinely evaluated, that colleges and universities are free from political pressure in deciding what to teach, that institutions have policies and practices to monitor credit hours and to ensure that credit hours are assigned appropriately to coursework, and that colleges and universities have policies to protect faculty and staff members, and promote faculty and staff professional development. Institutional accreditation also assures parents that a college is on sound financial footing. In other words, accreditation sends a signal to the public about the quality of academic programs, financial stability, and ethical standards of a college. If an institution has problems and has been sanctioned in some way by an accreditor, the public can access the information.
• Accreditation can be an agent of reform. For example, by including diversity in criteria by which an institution is judged, accrediting bodies push institutions to focus on diversity and hold them accountable for making progress in this area. By requiring assessment of learning outcomes, institutions are forced to implement assessment programs. Regional accreditation has been a forceful lever for attention to both of these issues.

Limitations

Accreditation also has its limitations and weaknesses. Some of these are:

• Accreditation decisions are based on peer assessments of institutional performance. Peers are peers. Although peers may understand institutional mission and expectations, peers may also be subject to subtle pressure to give peers the benefit of the doubt and not be too hard on them.
• Similarly, accreditation criteria and standards are set by member organizations. Although this can be a good thing, it has also led to criticism that higher education is too easy on itself.
• Accreditation criteria are open to multiple interpretations on the part of institutions as well as reviewers and institutional liaisons from the accrediting association. Review team members may interpret the criteria differently from team to team and from team member to team member, and also differently than presented by the accreditor in its trainings.  This can result in uneven application of the criteria at the review team level. Accrediting bodies allow appeals and typically require a second level of review where uneven reviews can be identified.
• Specialized accreditation focuses in much more detail on specific programs whereas institutional accreditation takes a much broader view. As a result, professional accreditation can sometimes get excessively cumbersome and demanding. Conversely, institutional reaccreditation may miss important aspects of institutional performance.
• Accreditation can drive institutions to be more alike than different. Obviously, this is a good thing if accreditation reinforces basic attributes of quality; it can be a negative force if it discourages uniqueness and differences that are the hallmark of the U.S. system of higher education.
• Accreditation is expensive in terms of time and money. Institutions and programs must pay to belong to accrediting associations at the institution and program levels. Self-study preparation can be expensive in terms of human resources devoted to the task. Moreover, the costs of travel, food and lodging, and honoraria for visiting team members are paid by the institution or program undergoing review. This may not be too costly for any single accreditation event, but think about a complex research university in which the institution not only pays for self-study preparation and team costs for institutional review but also has to cover costs for upwards of 20 professional program reviews that are conducted every six to ten years.

Program Review

As mentioned in the introduction, program review is a specific type of evaluation routinely carried out by colleges and universities. Program review for public colleges and universities is often guided by a state level public university governing or coordinating board. Regional accrediting bodies typically expect some form of regular program review as evidence that an institution continually reviews its programs and makes decisions based on such evaluative activities. In private universities, program review is institutionally determined and driven.

There is no one single model of program review. In fact, a campus or system can change its program review format from one iteration to the next. Typically, academic program review focuses on quality of academic programs. The audience is typically internal and reviews go no further than an institution’s governing board. A set of questions and criteria are identified by the chief academic officer, or in some cases, a state governing or coordinating board, to which the academic programs must respond in the form of a self-study. Program review documents may be reviewed internally at different levels. For example, in a recent round of program reviews at the University of Kansas, each academic department wrote a self-study in response to several questions posed by the provost (listed below) and rated itself. The dean of the school in which the program resides read and wrote a report either agreeing or disagreeing with the program’s self-assessment. Then, graduate program reviews were submitted to the executive committee of the graduate council, which provided an additional review. Finally, all program reviews were read and evaluated by a committee established by the provost. A summary report was prepared for the Board of Regents and the dean of each academic unit was provided with a detailed report about ratings.

The questions/criteria that drove the program review process introduced above were:

• Program mission (It is common for program review to ask for an assessment of centrality to the institution’s mission.)
• Faculty
  • Number of faculty
  • How productive are they in teaching, research and service?
  • How is the department planning for future retirements?
• Students
  • How productive is the program—student credit hour production, majors, time-to-degree?
  • Student outcomes
  • Numbers graduating, employment
• Evidence from outcomes assessment
• Challenges and opportunities

    Some universities incorporate external reviews of programs in their program review processes. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas often requires external reviews as part of program review. In one round of reviews, every department was reviewed by a team of up to two faculty members from other universities and one from another KU department. I have served on external review panels for programs in my field. Program review takes time and human resources, but presumably provides formative information for the program and may inform budgetary decisions. In contrast to institutional accreditation that focuses on meeting criteria or not, with no ratings of exceptional, very good, etc., I have seen internal program reviews that rate programs. Program review results can provide central academic administrators with a basis for investing in academic programs.

Program review for units such as student affairs, student success, co-curricular and other administrative units may also be performed, even if not typically required by accreditation bodies or state university governing boards. These program reviews are internally mandated or voluntary and may be guided by professional organizations and standards such those provided by the Council on Standards in Higher Education (CAS), which provide expectations and standards for functional areas within student affairs.  See the CAS standards website for more in-depth information (https://www.cas.edu/the-program-review-process.html) on this process. Also, see Henning and Roberts, 2024 for a fuller discussion of CAS standards and reviews in student affairs and related functional areas.

Such periodic reviews, even if not mandated as part of academic program review, parallel periodic reviews of student affairs, student success, and co-curricular programs seems like a good and useful process.

Summary

Accreditation, both institutional and specialized, and program review are expertise-based forms of evaluation unique to higher education. All forms of accreditation rely on an institution or a program to engage in a self-study process, produce a report that is then evaluated by others. Accreditation seeks to guarantee a fundamental standard of quality but makes no ranking of quality beyond “yes” the institution or program is accredited, the institution or program has deficiencies that must be rectified, or “no,” the program or institution fails to meet minimum standards.