What Regional Accreditors Can Learn From ACICS’s Demise To Drive Value For Universities And Students
A transformational event has been unfolding behind the scenes of academia over the past year. It is an event that has caused — and will likely continue to produce — seismic ripples throughout the nation’s institutions of higher education and their students for years to come.
What happened? In short, the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) — via its National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) — neutered the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS) by rescinding ACICS’s ability to accredit colleges and universities. Through its decision, the NACIQI has shut down the ACICS effectively.
For those that do not follow academia’s behind-the-scenes minutia carefully, it might seem as if the Federal government’s action against the ACICS came out of left field. After All, the ACICS had been the country’s largest national accreditor for decades.
The ACICS had petitioned the DoE to renew its recognition as an accreditation body that mandates renewal every five years.
What Got The ACICS Into Hot Water?
Department of Education staff (later affirmed by its Senior Department Official, Chief of Staff Emma Vadehra and finally by Secretary of Education John King) found the ACICS out of compliance in 21 key regularly areas.
In Chief of Staff Emma Vadehra’s letter to the ACICS, in which she affirms the recommendation of DoE staff members to decline accreditation renewal, she notes that the national agency has “major problems with the rigor of the agency’s accreditation and pre-accreditation standards and its application of those standards; its monitoring of the institutions that it accredits; and the enforcement of its own accrediting standards.”
In a nod to the cliché that talk is cheap, Chief of Staff Vadehra notes that “demonstrating compliance in this case requires more than just new policies that address the issues identified by Department staff; it requires evidence of effective application and implementation of those new policies, practices, and governance structures, which the agency simply cannot provide for all of these criteria within 12 months.”