Princeton and Other Elite Colleges Critical of Accreditation Process By Douglas Belkin And Andrea Fuller
http://www.wsj.com/articles/princeton-and-other-elite-colleges-critical-of-accreditation-process-1434594604
Princeton University is one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Its alumni include two former U.S. presidents and three current U.S. Supreme Court Justices, and the college’s rejection rate of undergraduate applicants is among the highest in the country. About 97% of its students graduate.
Shirley Tilghman, Princeton’s president at the time, says she was told by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education to emulate another college, which had filled an entire room with black, three-ring binders stuffed with documents. The reviewers said nothing about what was in those binders, stressing only the quantity of the data inside them, she recalls.
“I was speechless,” she says. “And not because we are arguably one of the most highly respected undergraduate institutions the country, but because they were completely disinterested in a description of how we ensure what was happening at Princeton that wasn’t in this immense bureaucratic collection of data.”
Elizabeth Sibolski, president of Middle States, says the group applies its standards to all the colleges it oversees, including a requirement that they track what students learn and use those results in planning.
The spat shows a different downside of the college accreditation system, the subject of a page-one article in The Wall Street Journal. Some colleges with spectacular reputations and sky-high graduation rates complain that accreditation is little more than expensive paper-pushing that can lead to picayune demands from reviewers.
Top colleges like Princeton spend years, millions of dollars and thousands of hours preparing for their review to the point that it can “weaken the quality of the institution as oppose to strengthen it,” Ms. Tilghman says.
At Cornell University, preparation for an accreditation review included the part-time labor of 75 people working 2½ years, according to the school.
Vanderbilt University administrators estimate that its College of Arts and Science devotes 5,000 hours a year to accreditation-related work. The engineering school uses 6,000 to 8,000 hours. The numbers climb when accreditation reports are due, according to the school.
Stanford University spent about $1 million a year for nearly seven years to prepare for an accreditation review. The college churned out 23 research papers, filed three reports to accreditors and hosted two site visits.
Among Stanford’s findings: Students who study a foreign language in an immersive environment learn more than students whose exposure is limited to the classroom, says Stephanie Kalfayan, vice provost and liaison to the accreditors.
Was it $7 million worth of insight? “No,” she says. “There were some things we might not have studied, but $7 million is a lot of financial aid.”
The frustration among highly selective schools has reached the ears of lawmakers, who are considering alternatives such as a “risk-adjusted” system that would allow accreditors to focus more on colleges near the margins and less on world-class institutions with long track records of success.
In response, accreditors say all kinds of colleges can benefit from the review process, which strives to help them improve.
Ms. Sibolski, the Middle States president, says colleges that have a graduation rate near 100% assume the number “speaks for itself.” But those colleges are able to fill up with students who are “the cream of the crop.”
Because of that, “you need something more than a graduation rate” to assess performance, she adds.
Write to Douglas Belkin at doug.belkin@wsj.com and Andrea Fuller at andrea.fuller@wsj.com
Comments are closed.
