Tag: American Council on Education

Why Are Trump and DeSantis Talking About Accreditation?

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Republican politicians have found a new target in their efforts to reshape higher education: accrediting agencies.

Announcing his presidential bid this month, Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, called out accrediting agencies as “cartels” that are driving the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies on college campuses.

If he were elected president, DeSantis said, the U.S. Department of Education would create “alternative accreditation regimes, where instead of saying, ‘You will only get accredited if you do DEI,’ you’ll have an accreditor that will say, ‘We will not accredit you if you do DEI.’” (Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs differ from campus to campus, and encompass supports for students from underserved communities, diversity statements in hiring, stand-alone offices aimed at inclusion, and diversity training for employees.)

Earlier in May, former President Donald Trump, who is running to return to office, said he would “fire” the existing accrediting agencies and create new ones to reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.”

The intricacies of accreditation policy are not usually the fodder of presidential campaigns. The accreditation process is complex, lengthy, and mostly opaque; for the average college, it happens as infrequently as once a decade; and the heads of accrediting agencies usually shun the media, let alone attention from partisan campaigns.

DeSantis has tried to put higher education front and center as a governor, said Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education. But even among experts, he said, accreditation is not usually a major issue in discussions of higher-ed policy.

Ralph A. Wolff, a former president of an accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, said the candidates’ references to accreditation are another attempt to scare the public over policies to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Nobody has lost accreditation for failing to meet a standard under DEI,” he said. “It’s another one of these myths — just a trigger to make someone the evil party.”

In the Spotlight

Mentions by two major presidential candidates are just the latest effort by conservative politicians to put a spotlight on the private nonprofit organizations that serve as gatekeepers for federal financial aid. Colleges that want to receive such aid must be accredited by a federally recognized accreditor.

In Congress, Rep. Burgess Owens, Republican of Utah, has introduced a bill that would prohibit accreditors from making colleges “meet any political litmus tests, such as requiring adherence to DEI standards, as a condition of accreditation.”

As governor, DeSantis championed a 2022 law requiring all of the state’s public colleges to seek accreditation from any agency that is not the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges — the group that now oversees Florida’s 28 state colleges and 12 public universities. The law came on the heels of the accreditor’s inquiries about political interference and conflicts of interest at Florida State University and the University of Florida.

Lawmakers in North Carolina are now considering a similar measure, inspired at least in part by the Southern Association’s questions about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s plan to start a School of Civic Life and Leadership. The accreditor asked whether the university’s trustees had involved faculty members in developing the plan. The accreditor’s standards require colleges to recognize “the importance of both faculty and administrative involvement in the approval of educational programs.”

The Southern Association’s president, Belle S. Wheelan, declined to comment for this article.

The association is one of seven accrediting bodies that oversee nearly all of the nation’s traditional public and private nonprofit colleges. They were previously called “regional” accreditors because their oversight was limited to specific states.

The new Florida law is possible only because those geographic limits were dropped by the Trump administration. Now any college can be accredited by any of those seven associations, though only a handful have sought to switch so far.

Nobody has lost accreditation for failing to meet a standard under DEI.

DeSantis and other conservative politicians have now seized on the fact that six of the seven major accrediting agencies require colleges to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, for example by considering colleges’ mission statements, the diversity of their faculties, and disparate outcomes between white students and students of color. The agency that has no DEI requirements is the Southern Association — the group from which Florida’s colleges are bound by state law to leave within the next decade.

Neither the DeSantis nor the Trump presidential campaigns responded to requests for comment.

Many Hurdles

Accreditation experts said the critique by DeSantis and other conservatives is misplaced. Their implication is that DEI measures are seeking to help one group of students at the expense of another group, said Sonny Ramaswamy, president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, another accreditor. “We are not going to disadvantage one group by trying to help another group,” he said.

Accreditors try to help all students succeed and do not focus only on racial disparities, said Jamienne S. Studley, president of the Western Association’s Senior College and University Commission. “‘All students’ includes veterans and transfer students,” she wrote in an email, “rural students and parents, part-time and students studying by distance or on campus, of all backgrounds, faiths, ages, and academic goals and programs.”

The proposals by both DeSantis and Trump would also face significant legal and regulatory hurdles.

DeSantis’s proposal may be slightly more plausible than Trump’s, said Fansmith of the American Council on Education, but neither is possible under current federal law, which bars the government from dictating anything to do with the curriculum or what is taught in college classrooms. Overhauling the federal Higher Education Act , which was due to be reauthorized a decade ago, to reshape or eliminate accreditation requirements is probably out of the question in the near future, Fansmith said, because neither party is likely to win a large enough majority in the U.S. Senate to proceed with anything that could be controversial.

There are legitimate concerns about how accreditation works, especially as it relates to accreditors’ roles in limiting the cost of college and rise in student debt, Fansmith said. But those issues don’t make for great campaign speeches.

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Eric Kelderman

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May 31, 2023
A Lesson for Colleges on Student Mental Health: Try New Things on a Small Scale

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Everyone is worried about students’ mental health. What can colleges actually do to help?

During a Friday session at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting, three researchers offered lessons learned from new research focused on eight colleges. Their core message was that administrators should start small, experiment with interventions, frequently assess how students feel about the interventions, and change course as needed.

Students don’t view their campus experience as a collection of offices and departments, like administrators often do, said Jennifer Maltby, director of data, analytics, and planning at the Rochester Institute of Technology. That should inform colleges’ approach to troubleshooting students’ mental-health challenges, Maltby said.

Improving student mental health is as complex as raising a child, said Allison Smith, director of health strategy and outcomes at New York University, and both tasks require constant adaptation to fit shifting needs.

Two other key findings were that colleges should pinpoint which student demographic groups are disproportionately failing to thrive, and that institutions should tailor their goals to improve the experiences of specific student populations, rather than attempting to create a blanket solution that will work for every student.

“For a trans student, that means being called the right name and right pronouns in class,” Smith said. “For a student of faith, that means being able to observe their religious holidays without getting penalized.”

Researchers also discovered that having a “core team” of four to eight individuals working to change an institution’s systems was an ideal management structure.

It’s impossible for one administrator, such as a vice president for student well-being, to reach every student and make the necessary changes that can improve students’ mental health, Smith said.

Inside the Research

The research followed Case Western Reserve University, New York University, Cornell University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University, Stanford University, the University at Albany in the State University of New York system, and the University of California at Los Angeles.

The study examined whether a concept known as “Triple Aim” — the idea that, simultaneously, a population can become healthier, health-care costs can decrease, and the quality of care can improve — could apply to student well-being. Smith is a co-founder of the Action Network for Equitable Wellbeing, a new collaborative of organizations dedicated to improving students’ mental health that aims to expand the effort to more colleges.

The colleges involved in the study frequently collected data through a survey called the Wellbeing Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings, allowing researchers to get a clear picture of what was working.

Maltby said one intervention at RIT focused on professors and students. Three professors were encouraged to include statements on their syllabi saying they cared about mental health and knew college was challenging.

Feedback from students was initially positive, and the initiative grew. But when the statement was included in the syllabi of 30 professors, the results changed. Students didn’t always feel that professors who included the statement on their syllabus acted in a way that showed they genuinely cared, ultimately causing more harm for students than good. Maltby’s team later discovered that marginalized students were disproportionately experiencing this harm.

“We were able to really pull back and say we’re not going to try and implement this statement universitywide because we understand that there are potential impacts on that for our students that are going to be negative,” Maltby said.

While it might seem resource-intensive to talk individually with students to get a better understanding of their lives and to collect data so frequently, Maltby believes the study’s approach could work for a range of colleges.

“Oftentimes folks will say it’s not possible or we can’t do it that way, and I think one of the things we’ve learned, especially through Covid, is that we can do lots of things that we previously thought were impossible when we have the will and interest to do that.” Maltby said.

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Kate Marijolovic

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April 17, 2023
Here Are the Parts of Their Job for Which Presidents Want More Training

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The college presidency — which has seen a wave of turnovers in recent years — has long been recognized as a challenging job that can sometimes put those in the position on the path to burnout. That’s among the reasons that the average time presidents have held their current position has dropped to 5.9 years, according to a new survey of college presidents.

That survey also offers some insights into what can make the job so tough: If presidents are spending less time in their jobs, they also need to quickly learn more about some aspects of higher education.

More on the ACE Survey

The latest American College President survey, released on Friday by the American Council on Education, asked college leaders about areas in which they would like more training. Of the 32 options that respondents could select, at least one out of five presidents said they wanted to learn more about roughly one-third of them. Among that group were topics like diversity and equity issues, fund raising, and capital improvement projects.

The survey, which embraced responses from more than 1,000 presidents, also revealed that the most popular professional-development prospects for men and women were largely the same. In the mix for women, however, was crisis management; for men, it was enrollment management.

Among the areas that nearly all college presidents reported feeling most confident about: student life or conduct issues, and the role of their spouses. Only 4.3 percent and 5.2 percent of leaders, respectively, said they wanted more training on those topics.

For more highlights about how presidents answered this question — “In which of the following areas would you like more training and/or development for your current presidency/CEO post?” — see below:

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Audrey Williams June

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April 13, 2023
College Presidents Are Less Experienced Than Ever — and Eyeing the Exit

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The average tenure of the college president has shrunk. Yes, again.

More on the ACE Survey

Typical presidents have been in their current job for 5.9 years, according to the results of the American Council on Education’s latest survey of the profession, published on Friday. That’s down from 6.5 years in 2016 and 8.5 years in 2006.

What’s more, a majority of those currently serving don’t think they will be in their current role in five years. And those presidents planning to depart aren’t leaving for some other college’s top job. Instead, they are looking at possible consultant roles, returning to the faculty, or working in a nonprofit outside of higher education, according to the survey, which ACE conducts every five years. The survey was emailed to presidents at 3,091 colleges and universities, with 1,075 responding. That response rate was down 15 percentage points, which the survey’s authors attributed to its being out to presidents for a shorter time than in previous years and no paper copies mailed.

Among the reasons for leaving, according to the survey: The Covid-19 pandemic and the growing political polarization in higher education have taken a toll on presidents.

“Covid was hard on presidents,” said Linda A. Livingstone, president of Baylor University. “There’s a lot of political pressure from all sides. It just wore out some presidents. It’s a challenging world to function in.”

All that pressure has presidents thinking they aren’t long for the corner office.

Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said they planned to step down in the next five years, with 25 percent of surveyed presidents saying they planned to leave in the next year or two. That’s an increase from five years ago, when 22 percent said they were planning to leave in a year or two and 32 percent said they were planning to leave in three to five years. Those who plan to leave in the next year have been in office for an average of 6.7 years and are, on average, 61.7 years old.

Only 39 percent of those thinking they will be out in the next five years say they will retire. Departing presidents who aren’t retiring are more likely to try to become a consultant than they are to pursue a similar role at a different college — 27 percent compared with 23 percent. Sixteen percent are aiming for work at a nonprofit or philanthropic entity.

The average president signs a five-year contract, said James H. Finkelstein, a professor emeritus at George Mason University who studies college presidents and their contracts. That hasn’t changed much in the past 15 years, according to his study of contracts.

The shorter average tenure has a major effect on how presidents behave when they walk into the administration building for the first time. Out are months-long listening tours. In is rapid action.

“You have to listen faster and learn faster and then identify those two or three areas you can have a significant impact on in a shorter amount of time,” said Livingstone, who started at Baylor in 2017.

Not only is making a mark quicker an imperative if a president has only five years, but having a big impact quickly can be a route to extending a tenure past the average, she said.

Old, White, and Male

The greater turnover hasn’t seemed to chip away at white men’s hold on the presidency.

“Over the last five years, we haven’t moved the needle on what our presidents look like,” said Hollie Chessman, director of practice and research in ACE’s Education Futures Lab, which conducted the survey. “They are older. They are men. They are white.”

Men make up 67 percent of college presidents, with women holding the top job at 33 percent of colleges — up about 10 percentage points since 2006. Seventy-two percent of presidents are white. Twenty-eight percent of presidents are nonwhite.

Student bodies are much more diverse. In 2021, white students made up about 53 percent of all students, according to federal data. In the same year, female students made up about 58 percent of all students.

It is taking men less time to go from aspiring to the presidency to landing the job, the survey data shows. Male presidents, on average, start thinking about becoming a president at age 43.6 and land the job at age 51.7. Female presidents, however, start aspiring to be a president at age 46.9 and land the job at age 52.8. Men of color are the youngest to start aspiring to a presidency, at age 41.5, but take until age 50.4 to land the job, a gap of nearly nine years. Women of color aspire to the presidency at age 45.7 and are appointed at age 51.6.

Livingstone isn’t surprised that women are, on average, older when they land a presidency.

“Sometimes you see an expectation that women need more experience before they are ready,” said Livingstone, who was the only female president in the Big 12 Conference when she took office at Baylor.

Women who reach the presidency tend to come through the traditional route of faculty to administration to presidency, the survey showed. Men can take more varied paths to the presidency, the survey found. Think of politicians like the former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, now the University of Florida’s president.

Diversifying the presidency is going to take a lot of work at lower levels of administration, the survey’s authors said.

“We have to take a close look at the level of support those individuals are getting on the pathway to the presidency,” said Danielle Melidona, an analyst with ACE’s Education Futures Lab.

That means looking at levels low in the administrative pecking order, from assistant deans to associate provosts, Livingstone said. As those ranks diversify, the upper ranks will follow, she said.

But more than just that needs to happen, Chessman said. “If we are going to diversify the position, we are not going to do it with just the provost moving up,” she said. “We have to have the conversation about why don’t we see more women coming” in the pipeline.

That same thought extends to having a higher percentage of minority presidents, she said.

“The question is, How do we make the presidency look more like our students?”

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David Jesse

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April 13, 2023
A New Push to Make Financial-Aid Offers More Transparent

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So how much does this cost?

It’s a simple question people ask all time, whether they’re shopping for a winter coat or a Camry. But as many Americans know, it’s much more difficult to determine exactly how much money they’ll need to cover the costs of attending a particular college. For one thing, financial-aid offers are often downright confusing.

A new national initiative intends to change that. On Tuesday the leaders of 10 higher-education associations plan to announce the formation of a task force that aims to enhance the “clarity, accuracy, and consistency” of financial-aid offers, the main tool colleges use to communicate eligibility for federal, state, and institutional financial-aid programs to students. M. Peter McPherson, president emeritus of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and chairman of the task force, told The Chronicle that its members plan to develop a set of standards and principles for colleges.

“This is a huge financial decision for families — they really need to understand what they’re getting into,” said McPherson, a former president of Michigan State University. “Millions of these aid offers go out every year. So it’s a big societal question whether the information is presented with clarity and accuracy, using words that people can understand.”

In recent years, McPherson has examined financial-aid offers his grandchildren received. “By and large, I thought they did a good job,” he said of those offers. “But in some cases, they weren’t as complete as they could be. Like, what’s the estimated full cost of attendance? And what’s included in that? I don’t think this is ever going to be perfect for every student, but we can have some common language, definitions, and expectations of what should be included in a way that can make things easier for students to make comparisons.”

This is a huge financial decision for families — they really need to understand what they’re getting into.

Concern about the lack of clarity in financial-aid offers is nothing new. More than a decade ago, the Obama administration released a model financial-aid offer that colleges could use to provide prospective students with standardized information on their true costs of attendance, as well as any grants, loans, and other financing options, such as Work-Study or military benefits.

But that initiative wasn’t a game-changer. And high-school counselors and college-access advocates continue to complain that the information institutions send to students is misleading and opaque at worst — and inconsistent at best.

That inconsistency is the result of colleges’ relying on homegrown systems to crank out financial-aid offers year after year. “Over time, colleges have developed their own language or parlance, and it’s often very focused on the way that administrators think about financial aid,” said Justin Draeger, president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, which is part of the initiative. “So what you have are aid offers that are all over the place.” As a result, it’s often difficult for students to get a clear sense of how much they must pay to attend a particular college, making it a challenge to compare the offers they receive.

Draeger described some typical concerns about aid offers. “One of the most common things we see is that they don’t contain the costs to the student or family. It’s ‘here’s how much financial aid you’re getting,’ but it’s devoid of the cost that they’ll be incurring. And that includes both billable direct expenses to the institution but also the nonbillable indirect expenses that schools use in constructing a cost of attendance for financial-aid purposes. Some families are just interested in how much they owe the school. Others will need financial aid to cover nonbillable expenses, like rent or transportation. Those costs are a really important piece of the financial-aid picture.”

Another common issue: colleges “mislabeling” student loans. “That might mean not labeling loans as actual loans,” Draeger said. “Other times, it’s combining loans and grants when, really, those two things ought to be separated. We’ve found examples of colleges that have lumped all their financial aid into sort of one bucket.”

Colleges aren’t trying to mislead students, Draeger said. But understaffing in financial-aid offices and the nonstop scramble to meet students’ needs while complying with federal regulations can leave a staff with little time or bandwidth to update its information system with consumer-friendly language, or to make sure its aid offers reflect the industry’s latest best practices.

Draeger’s association has long pushed for greater standardization in aid offers. It has tested various templates with students and families to determine which ones seem most clear and effective. And the association’s Code of Conduct identifies basic components that every aid offer should include.

The new initiative will expand on those efforts by bringing together college presidents, financial-aid leaders, and admissions officials. The task force’s members also include the American Council on Education, the American Association of Community Colleges, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

That task force will be weighing questions about the precise wording of financial-aid offers. But Draeger sees something greater at stake.

“In higher education, we are struggling with a public-trust issue, and we’re seeing that in poll after poll,” he said. “If we want to be trusted partners to students and families in furthering our educational and economic pursuits, then we have to be completely open and transparent. And I think colleges want to be open and transparent. This is just one area where we haven’t really focused enough resources and attention.”

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Eric Hoover

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November 28, 2022
Covid-19 Disrupted International Education, but Colleges Remain Hopeful About Global Engagement

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The Covid-19 pandemic was a major disruptor of American colleges’ international-education efforts, yet college leaders surveyed by the American Council on Education remain optimistic about the future of higher education’s global engagement.

Sixty percent of colleges said that their level of institutional internationalization during the pandemic was low or very low, according to a new report, “Mapping Internationalization on U.S. Campuses,” released today. By contrast, 47 percent of institutions said their international activities had been accelerating in the years prior to the pandemic, 2016 to 2020.

Still, academic leaders took a positive view of future internationalization efforts, with two-thirds predicting that their institution’s overall level of international engagement would increase in the next five years.

Despite that hopeful outlook, the report, the fifth in a series of surveys the council has conducted since 2006, shows that the shift away from international education as a campus priority actually began before the pandemic. For instance, in 2016, 72 percent of colleges reported their internationalization efforts were accelerating, compared with only about half of institutions in the years immediately preceding the Covid outbreak.

The number of colleges that include international or global education in their mission statements or strategic plans has also declined over the years. In the 2012 report, 51 percent of respondents said internationalization was part of their institutional mission. By 2017, the share had fallen to 49 percent. In this latest survey, 43 percent answered in the affirmative.

Likewise, the share of colleges reporting that international education is among the top five priorities in their strategic plan has decreased over time: 52 percent in 2012, 47 percent in 2017, and just 36 percent in the most recent report.

The report’s authors don’t delve into the reasons for this shift, but as The Chronicle has previously reported, the factors may include a continuing budget squeeze following the 2009 recession, a growing reckoning with the negative social and economic consequences of globalization, and, critically, a political and policy environment during the Trump administration that put global mobility and international academic partnerships in the cross hairs.

There are also questions about whether colleges truly institutionalized their commitment to international engagement. Indeed, in the latest report, only 18 percent of respondents said they had a formal strategy for striking partnerships with universities around the globe. Just 28 percent said they had assessed the impact of their international engagement in the past three years.

Taken together, the findings paint a troubling picture of American colleges de-emphasizing international education at a time that global interconnectedness and collaboration is more crucial than ever — as underscored by the pandemic itself.

But at the same time, college leaders’ sense of confidence about the future of internationalization suggests a possible, more optimistic scenario, one in which the pandemic-enforced pause on many international activities could lead to stronger re-engagement. We may have to wait until the next survey to measure it definitively.

Meanwhile, here are some additional highlights from the newly released survey, which includes responses from 903 institutions:

College leaders’ experience with and views on global engagement differs by institutional type. Respondents at doctoral institutions, for example, were much more bullish about the future of international engagement, with 78 percent saying they expected their colleges’ level of internationalization to increase in the next five years. Among those at associate colleges, 56 percent had a similarly positive outlook.

Likewise, doctoral and baccalaureate institutions were much more likely to include international education in their mission statements than associate or special-focused colleges.

Colleges emphasize educational and diversity goals as key drivers for internationalization. Although tuition dollars from international students have become more critical to colleges’ bottom line, only a third of respondents said that “to generate revenue for the institution” was a primary reason for global engagement, making it a distant fourth choice.

The top two reasons were “improving student preparedness for a global era,” selected by 70 percent of respondents, and “diversifying students, faculty, and staff,” cited by 64 percent.

Colleges have increased the support they give international students, both in and out of the classroom. Three quarters of respondents reported having an orientation to their institution or to the American classroom for international students, up from 69 percent five years earlier. Two thirds of colleges said they provide individualized academic support services. And more than half said they offer mental-health services for international students, who were a particularly vulnerable group during the pandemic.

Institutions have increased professional-development opportunities for faculty members related to internationalization, such as workshops to help them integrate more international-learning outcomes into the curriculum and use technology to enhance the international dimensions of their courses.

For more coverage of this report, as well as news and analysis of what’s new in international education, check out Latitudes, The Chronicle’s global newsletter. You can subscribe here.

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Karin Fischer

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November 2, 2022