Bobbing for Bad Apples: Accreditation, Quantitative Performance Measures, and the Identification of Low-Performing Colleges

ABSTRACT

Recent trends in higher education (rising debt, school closures, increasing tuition) have increased interest in improving accountability and oversight in U.S. higher education beyond current accreditation practices. Common solutions include using quantitative measures like graduation and default rates to benchmark performance. Using historical data on accreditation actions, we compare the performance of a hypothetical quantitative evaluation system to contemporary accreditation standards in identifying low-performing schools. We find first that schools facing accreditation sanctions are, on average, also low performing on the quantitative outcomes we consider. However, if we use this average performance as a benchmark to identify other low-performing schools, then a substantial portion of the higher education sector would be implicated. These results raise questions about the capacity of a purely quantitative evaluation system to narrowly identify low-performing schools. We conclude with a discussion of the issues concerning data, equity, and other considerations for higher education accountability moving forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Accreditation
• college ratings
• postsecondary accountability
• quantification
• for-profit regulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Downloaded October 1, 2016, from http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/GetDownLoadFile.aspx.

2. These rates have been criticized for including only first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students and for poorly tracking student transfers (U.S. Department of Education, 2014).

3. Note that the threshold-setting school was not the same for each measure. The lowest-performing school based on the graduation rate of the schools that lost their accreditation was not the same as the lowest-performing school in terms of default rate. Yet there were colleges that performed worse than both of these schools on both measures.