Peace in Accreditation Land

Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Doug Lederman summarizes recent happenings in "accreditation land" this way: "In stark contrast to 2007, federal negotiations over accreditation rules end in accord, overcoming dispute over student learning outcomes that might have derailed the proceeding[s]."

"Those issues were on the agenda again as another panel of negotiators completed several months of work on accreditation at an Education Department office building Tuesday, but with a dramatically different result (and dramatically less drama). The college administrators, higher education lobbyists, accreditors, state officials and others around the conference table -- including Education Department staff members -- reached "consensus" on a package of 16 regulatory proposals to carry out changes Congress made in legislation to renew the Higher Education Act last summer. (When such negotiating sessions end with "consensus" among the parties on a package of regulatory changes, a federal agency is bound to propose them as is; when no consensus is reached, the agency can essentially do whatever it wants.)"

Read the full article here:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/20/accredit

What Do You Mean by 'What Does a College Degree Cost?'

If you want to know how much needs to be spent by "someone" to get a degree, $40,000 may be the answer. A recent Delta Study report says that answer also depends on how you perceive the role of colleges.

This link is to an Inside Higher Ed report by Doug Lederman:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/19/degree

"The paper shows that it is distinctly possible to come up with such a figure, but the wide variation in the numbers -- based on institution type, program, degree level, and other factors -- suggests that the answer will depend in large part on how the question is framed. And that decision is a surprisingly value-laden one, says Johnson. "You frame the question one way if you are only interested in students who graduate, and another way if you want to know the cost for people who go to college and don't complete," he says. "The point is, this is not just a data question. It's a question of what it is that we want from our colleges and universities."

This link is to the Delta Study report on degree costs (PDF):
http://www.deltacostproject.org/resources/pdf/johnson3-09_WP.pdf

What’s a Financial Aid Director to Do?

This article by Doug Ledermen featured in Inside Higher Education discusses the Financial Aid problems that many Financial Aid offices have recently come under fire for. Ledermen brings up many pertinent issues on the topic including how many Financial Aid offices have conflicting compliance troubles.

"Financial aid and lending officials in New York are far from alone in facing potential uncertainty over which requirements to abide by. More than a dozen state attorneys general have adopted their own codes of conduct, and virtually any student loan provider — and any college that enrolls students from New York — is technically covered by the SLATE law.

“If you have 5 or 10 or 15 different standards that institutions are being held to, that enormously complicates their efforts to comply, and results in the possibility of significant confusion,” says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “At the end of the day, everybody is further ahead if the standards, rules and procedures are clear and widely understood.” (One university’s recent stab at comparing the differences among the many proposals out there can be found here.)"

A Worldwide Test for Higher Education?

Doug Lederman writes, in Inside Higher Ed, about a quiet move to explore implementing a worldwide student learning outcomes assessment for higher education. Not everyone is happy with the idea; the comments section is quite lively.

[T]he Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has convened a small group of testing experts and higher education policy makers who have met quietly in recent months to discuss the possibility of creating a common international system to measure the learning outcomes of individual colleges and university systems, along the lines of the well-regarded test that OECD countries now administer to 15-year-olds, the Program for International Student Assessment.

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[SCUPer] Trudy W. Banta, a professor of higher education and senior adviser to the chancellor for academic planning and evaluation at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said she believed that it would be extremely difficult to design one measure that could apply “across the many cultures, languages, institutions” that are part of the OECD universe. Beyond those practical concerns, though, Banta, who has written in Inside Higher Ed and other publications about the limitations of standardized measures of learning, expressed a more philosophical concern. “I’m afraid that everybody is looking for a silver bullet, a magic potion, that will tell them about quality” in higher education. “The latest tool in that arsenal is a standardized test,” which inevitably results, she said, in oversimplified measurements of institutions’, or in this case potentially countries’, success or failure.