NACIQI Meeting and Other Accreditation-Related Issues

Where Winds Are Blowing on Accreditation (Inside Higher Ed, June 21, 2017) “At meeting of federal advisory panel [NACIQI], some members push accreditors to set ‘bright lines’ for colleges’ performance, while others caution against oversimplification.”

Students’ Rising Expectations Pose Challenge to Online Programs (Chronicle of Higher Education [Subscription Required], June 20, 2017) “’If you’re going to shorten your course, you’ve got to be careful that you have the requisite amount of work,’ said [co-author of the report] David L. Clinefelter. In the past, accreditors and colleges have faced scrutiny for inflating the credits they awarded for online programs.”

Senator, Come Visit My Classroom (Inside Higher Ed, June 19, 2017) “You and your staff are inundated by calls to ‘improve’ or change accreditation by having accreditors take quantitative student outcomes into account. You probably don’t know that even though we’ve been hearing the ‘outcome’ story for over 30 years, there has yet to be found a quantitative outcome that is reliable and valid.”

Should This College Operator Run a Federal Oversight Panel? (Huffington Post, June 19, 2017) “For some people engaged in the world of higher education politics, watching Arthur Keiser ascend the dais at a Washington, DC, hotel Tuesday morning as the new chair of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) — the group of experts charged with advising the Department on the performance of college accrediting organizations — might be a bit like watching Donald Trump get sworn in as President of the United States.”

Aligning Institutional, National & Regional Strategies to Strengthen Quality Assurance (UNESCO Regional Conference on Quality Assurance of Higher Education in Asia-Pacific, June 15-16, 2017) A presentation on efforts by the Asia-Pacific Quality Network and the CHEA International Quality Group.