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Opinion
Here Comes the Unfunded Mandate for Your IT Department!
2/22/2007
How this relates to information technology is that some of the time and money it takes to develop, implement, and maintain the collection and reporting of an awful lot of new data will have an impact on the resources of campus-based IT teams if the administration gets its way. IT staff won't be hit the hardest, but they will be hit.
How is quality control in higher ed done now?
Right now, "quality control" for higher education is basically left up to (a) the marketplace (sounds kind of right-wing) and (b) to nonprofit-based, "voluntary" procedures for accreditation (sounds kinda left-wing). Here's how it goes.
You've heard of accrediting agencies? They go by a bunch of names, and there are all sorts of specialized ones. There's one called the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), where you can find useful links to a lot of related information. In many minds, the most important ones are--and I found this quite confusing for a long time--the "regional" accrediting agencies, not the "national" ones.
On a cycle--this is simplified--of every ten years, each college or university prepares and submits large datasets and tons of "explanatory narrative" to their particular regional accrediting agency. There is a lot of back and forth, and eventually teams of visitors (staff and faculty from other colleges and universities under the umbrella of the accrediting agency). Among many other things, the peer-experts from the accrediting agencies look for assessment of Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs), for the outcomes of regular assessment of institutional effectiveness (how the school runs itself), and for evidence that the SLOs and the institutional effectiveness data are used in planning, including the budgeting process.
This process works so well that a number of colleges and universities in other countries actually participate, voluntarily. Well, if they don't participate and gain accreditation, the other schools won't accept their transfer credits, and lots of other things happen, like restricted access to student loans and the like.
There is literally nothing like it elsewhere on the planet. And that voluntary accreditation process is the envy of the rest of the world. More and more colleges and universities from other countries are getting accredited by US "regional" agencies. At a recent workshop on planning and accreditation I met professors from universities in France and Egypt that are accredited by the same "regional" association.
Surely any process can be improved. However, it's pretty clear that US higher education's quality improvement procedures are not "broken," yet the federal government wants to "fix" them. That's scary news to a lot of your peers on campus, and not just due to all of the unfunded work that could be required.
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