Accreditation & Academic Quality Assurance:Can We Get There from Here?

Abstract

A well-known New England story has a city resident braking his car to a halt in front of a Maine farmhouse and calling out to the farmer sitting on the porch: “Which way to East Millinocket?” The farmer ponders: “Well, ya turn left by the fire station in the village and take the old post road by the reservoir and ..., no, that won’t do. Best to continue straight on by the tar road until you reach the school house and then turn left on the road to Bennett’s Lake until..., no, that won’t work either. East Millinocket, ya say. Come to think of it, you can’t get there from here!” For those still convinced that there is a need to improve the quality of teaching and learning in US colleges and universities, the recent rejection by the higher education community of the National Policy Board on Higher Education Institutional Accreditation’s (NPB) proposals to link the standards of voluntary accreditation to measurable improvements in student achievement suggests a similar dilemma. Which way to quality assurance in higher education? In reviewing the failed attempt to reform academic accreditation, it appears that we can’t get there from here. Part of the problem was that the NPB was unable to effectively articulate the inadequacies of the current process and standards of academic accreditation, and convincingly suggest how accreditation could be improved so as to clearly demonstrate to the public that institutions of higher education are responsibly assuring the quality of their academic programs and degrees. Another part of the problem is that the debate about accreditation and academic quality in the United States has been a remarkably insulated discussion, which has disregarded viable alternatives for improving quality assurance in higher education. In particular, those involved in the US accreditation movement have generally ignored quality assurance developments in higher education in other parts of the world, which may offer useful and established models for improving our own processes (Westerheijden, Brennan, Maassen, 1994).