Accreditation is not normally a topic that grabs public attention. Its process is secretive, and its standards are vague. Lately, however, college and university accreditors have found themselves at the center of a political debate that could end up changing how they operate.

Since coming into office, President George W. Bush has intensified the push for more accountability in education, starting with primary and secondary schools. Now, with the Higher Education Act up for renewal next year, the Bush administration is likely to call for similar changes in how colleges and universities are evaluated.

Although they have yet to offer details, administration officials have signaled their interest in revamping accreditation to include specific measurements, such as graduation rates, in order to determine how well colleges are educating their students. In a five-year plan released in March 2002, Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige said that the No Child Left Behind Act, which demands greater accountability and performance from primary and secondary schools, will guide this administration's future legislative proposals.

Many accrediting agencies and colleges oppose standardized measures, arguing that simple statistics can't effectively evaluate such complex institutions. Their primary lobbying arm, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which represents 3,000 colleges and universities and more than 60 accrediting organizations, recently told Congress that its members "oppose any 'bright line' persistence- or completion-rate standard" for institutions. Such an approach, the group said, "would be ill conceived because it ignores the obvious and enormous variety" of colleges and universities in the United States.

Severing the Link

Accreditation has always been a voluntary process. Since 1965, however, the federal government has made accreditation a requirement for any college or university that wants federal funds, including student-aid money. That makes accreditation essential for the vast majority of higher-education institutions.

Although accreditation agencies are nongovernmental, the federal government oversees them. Each, for example, must tailor its standards to meet the Department of Education's criteria for measuring the quality of an institution.

Among other things, accreditors must look at curriculums, facilities, and students' support services. In the 1992 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the department added one more measure: "Success with respect to student achievement." While the other measures are vague, that one is specific. Accreditors are required, where appropriate, to look at such data as course completion, state-licensing examination results, and job-placement rates.

The regional accrediting agencies use such statistics sparingly, however. They accredit the bulk of liberal-arts colleges and large research universities, which don't necessarily track that information in a consistent format.

As the 1992 changes suggest, the federal government is constantly tinkering with accreditation. Demands for more accountability and more concrete measurements of quality are nothing new, and legislators have put forth many proposals, only to shelve them later on.

However, the demand to focus more on the kinds of graduates colleges turn out, and pay less attention to the number of books in the library, or the percentage of professors with terminal degrees, has remained consistent for the past decade.

Accreditors take such demands seriously, and say that they have been making appropriate changes to their standards. But some observers are clearly unimpressed. At one extreme, several special-interest groups and Republican legislators are calling for an end to the link between accreditation and federal aid.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which counts Lynne V. Cheney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and wife of Vice President Richard B. Cheney, as one of its founding members, released a scathing report last fall titled "Can College Accreditation Live Up to Its Promise?"

The report concluded that accreditation should not be mandatory for federal aid because the process is costly and meaningless for measuring educational quality.

Rep. Thomas E. Petri, a Wisconsin Republican -- whose wife, Anne D. Neal, is the executive director of the trustees and alumni council -- has introduced a bill that would sever the link between accreditation and access to federal aid.

Few in higher education expect that tie to be cut, but the proposals have illuminated the depth of disenchantment with the current system.

There's a consensus among many legislators, Education Department officials, and even a few higher-education administrators, that the current accreditation process is inconsistent and needs to be reformed.

"Reform is in the air, and higher-education leaders must embrace it," says Lawrence J. DeNardis, president of the University of New Haven and a member of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which reviews all of the federally recognized accrediting agencies on behalf of the Education Department.

"I think we have a good foundation to build on, and it would be a mistake to just smugly declare that the U.S. has the best system of higher education in the world. ... We have to all work together to improve the system."

Differing Views

The current debate has revealed a gap between the regional accrediting agencies, which accredit the majority of colleges and universities, and national accreditors, which accredit more specialized institutions, such as for-profit colleges and those with a specific academic focus, like culinary arts or engineering.

The six regional accreditors are against applying standardized measures of student learning to all of their institutions, arguing that doing so would result in unfair comparisons among community colleges, liberal-arts colleges, and research universities.

"It would be a disaster if institutions have to rely on testing, or some other absolute number, to evaluate their education," says Steven D. Crow, executive director of one of the regional accreditors, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

"Every college feels that it is putting a slightly different imprint on its students. And across a variety of institutions, you have to measure student learning in consideration of their mission."

National accreditors, on the other hand, are more comfortable using quantifiable criteria such as graduation and job-placement rates. Those measures fit naturally with the mission of their member institutions, typically trade and technical colleges that train students for specific careers.

For example, the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology, the biggest national accreditor in the United States, has devised equations for member institutions to calculate course-completion and job-placement rates. The commission clearly states that institutions must remain within "one standard deviation of the average rate" to maintain accreditation status.

"I think that for national accreditors, our actions going forward will be more and better of the same," says Steven A. Eggland, executive director of another national commission, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.

"We will continue to collect as much quantifiable information as we can -- we look at a lot of processes and outcomes."

Gaining Credibility

The national accreditors are clearly in favor at the Department of Education, which has praised their accreditation methods, calling them clear and well defined. It was not always that way. In the early 1990s, the student-loan default rate among proprietary institutions averaged 40 percent, prompting heavy criticism from the Education Department that fly-by-night colleges were not being monitored appropriately. As the organizations responsible for endorsing those colleges, national accreditors found their credibility severely damaged. They subsequently worked hard to follow the department's recommendations as a way of restoring their reputation.

It worked. In a December meeting of the Consumer Bankers Association, Sally L. Stroup, the department's assistant secretary for postsecondary education, commended proprietary colleges for doing a "great job cleaning up their act."

In addition, she said that their accreditors' standards are "better than the big regional commissions" and that the department generally views proprietary institutions "as equals to four-year schools."

The Education Department has close ties to the proprietary sector. Before her current appointment, Ms. Stroup worked as a lobbyist for the University of Phoenix, a for-profit institution accredited by the North Central Association. Her colleague, Deputy Assistant Secretary Jeffrey R. Andrade, was a consultant to the Career Colleges Association, the largest Washington lobbying group for proprietary colleges.

The administration's approval of national accreditors was echoed in a series of four audits released over the past year by the Office of the Inspector General for the Education Department. Two of the audits assessed the standards used by national accreditors, while the other two evaluated regional accreditors.

The audit of the largest national accreditor, the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology, noted that the commission had defined, quantifiable standards for its member institutions, including completion and placement rates.

"The general feedback was that we had taken a progressive approach" to evaluating student learning," says Elise Scanlon, the executive director of the commission.

The review of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association, by contrast, was highly critical.

The inspector general's office concluded that North Central's standards are so vague that they can't be applied objectively, and are therefore useless.

The auditors "spent two weeks here and they kept on coming back and asking for numbers to back up our findings, and we didn't have the numbers," says the North Central Association's Mr. Crow.

"So the conclusion [they drew] was that because we didn't have numbers, we don't have standards."

Trying Hard

Regional commissions are frustrated by such criticisms, saying they have been trying to change their standards in line with what the department has asked for.

"I don't think we're at odds with the legislature about wanting accountability or measuring student learning," says Jean Avnet Morse, executive director of the regional Middle States Commission on Higher Education. "We just think we're already doing a lot of that."

At Middle States, for example, Ms. Morse says her commission changed its standards in 2002 to include assessment of general-education skills and the measurement of technological competence and information literacy. It also pared down its emphasis on resources such as library books.

Regional accreditors also say they've been working hard for years to develop better measurements of what students learn. In 2000, the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions secured a two-year, $500,000 grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to determine the most effective ways to evaluate student learning. Council members have used the results of the study to modify their standards, and are still phasing in changes.

Still, many regional accreditors concede that despite their efforts, they haven't made any detailed measurements that would apply across the board to all of their member institutions.

"The only thing that we've been able to agree to is that there should be flexibility in choosing the standards, and it would be difficult to put them in specific terms," says Mr. DeNardis, the board member of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity.

More Transparent

The biggest challenge for accreditors is proving to legislators that they can evaluate colleges carefully and consistently without resorting to requirements imposed from outside.

After years of hearing complaints that they are too secretive about their procedures, accreditors are beginning to agree that their behind-closed-doors approach has made it hard for outsiders to understand what they do.

"I think we need to be more transparent," says Arthur J. Rothkopf, a member of the Education Department's accreditation-advisory committee and the president of Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa.

"We need to put more information out there in front of the public about the results of accreditation.

Right now, all people know is whether or not the schools have been accredited, and it would be better if we released information about the defects of a college and how they can be fixed."

Still, there is hope that legislative interference can be limited, or at least result in a positive change.

"Sometimes it takes the threat of a nonfriendly oversight process to take it into an arena of cooperation," says Robert C. Andringa, chairman of the Education Department's advisory group on accreditation, and president of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.

He warns, however, that any attempt to impose a strict template on all accreditors will probably backfire.

"Given the nature of higher education, with its fierce commitment to academic freedom, it's not going to respond the way it's supposed to respond if [the reauthorization] becomes a heavy handed process."

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ACCREDITATION IN ACTION

U.S. Department of Education
The department oversees accrediting agencies and requires them to evaluate their member institutions in 10 areas, including the quality of their curriculums, facilities, faculties, fiscal management, and student achievement. The department relies on accreditors to come up with their own ways to measure those areas.

Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools
A nongovernmental, voluntary organization, the commission accredits nearly 1,000 postsecondary institutions in 19 states. Institutions are evaluated according to five broad criteria: adherence to their mission, educational effectiveness, educational programs, institutional integrity, and institutional organization. The North Central Association describes the "patterns of evidence" it looks for but does not assign them numerical values.