Redesigning the Accreditor? Comparative student learning measures? Changes are afoot!

From Inside Higher Education, April 14,2011

News: What's 'Good Enough'? - Inside Higher Ed

Last week, at his agency's Academic Resource Conference here, Wolff and WASC's other leaders sought to sell presidents, provosts, and faculty members from the region's four-year colleges on the idea that, with policy makers in Washington increasingly questioning the future of accreditation, the time has come for major changes in the agency's peer review process.

Many of the alterations in the "redesign" would represent a significant break with how WASC and the other regional accrediting agencies have historically operated, including by making public the commission’s letters of findings about individual colleges and using an outside auditing firm to review the finances of publicly traded higher education companies during WASC’s accreditation process. Currently, WASC announces the actions it has taken on colleges, but does not release the evaluations themselves.

But perhaps no change would be more dramatic than a proposed requirement that colleges benchmark their own learning outcomes and measures of student success (i.e., retention and graduation rates) against those of their peers. One WASC document summarizing the commission's goals suggested that each institution would work with WASC to set a "target graduation rate" (and potentially different rates for different subgroups) that it would "be expected to meet or exceed."