Mexican universities and accreditation

On the main continent of North America, the United States has been the only country to have a regional accreditation system for post-secondary educational institutions. While institutions are not required to be regionally accredited, most want (and need) to be, in order to offer federal student aid, as well as have the status of a recognized institution. Specialized accreditors, such as NCATE, certainly can and do accredit without thought to country borders, but neither Canada nor Mexico have had regional accreditation systems in place for institutions across the board.

It is interesting to consider how much influence lawmakers have over accreditation requirements though. In Mexico, the Mexican Senate has recently passed a law that would require post-secondary educational institutions to seek "external evaluation," to cut down on the number of diploma mills and increase the quality of and confidence in the Mexican educational system. "External evaluation" certainly describes what we know as regional accreditation in the United States. Higher education is exploding in Mexico, with increasing demand being met by an increasing number of new institutions. There are currently more than 2,000 universities in Mexico, and over 1,800 of these are private institutions. Only 82 of the more than 2,000 universities have any form of accreditation at present.

More information can be found in the following article (requires a subscription to access online content):

Lloyd, M. (2006, January 4). Mexican lawmakers take steps to require
     accreditation in bid to root out "junk universities". Chronical of Higher
     Education, today's news. Retrieved January 4, 2006, from
     http://www.chronicle.com 

AALE (American Academy for Liberal Education)

The ability of the AALE (American Academy for Liberal Education) to accredit is questionable right now, because the U.S. Dept. of Education has received a recommendation from an advisory committee that it suspend recognition of this program as an accreditor. Evidently the problem is related to whether or not the AALE requires institutions to adequately demonstrate how they assess student learning. The president of the AALE, Jeffrey Wallin, has been quoted in articles saying that they have no problem meeting any requirements from the Dept. of Education, and that they do pay a lot of attention to assessment. They hope to resolve the issue soon.

For more information, see the article entitles "Advisory Committee to U.S. Education Dept. Penalizes Accreditor of Conservative Colleges," by Burton Bollag, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/9/2005 (subscription required)--http://www.chronicle.com .

I know of a couple of institutions that have AALE accreditation, and these institutions indeed did put a lot of work into assessment efforts prior to earning their AALE accreditations. It will be interesting to see how this problem is resolved, and how quickly.

Middle States annual conference

I recently returned from attending the annual conference held by the Middle States Association--always a valuable conference. My institution went through its ten-year re-accreditation visit last year, and received our results that we are fully re-accredited for the next ten years. So it was truly a pleasure to go to the conference this year, just to learn and plan for the future, rather than feeling pressured to find every possible tip to help us attain re-accredited status!

Middle States will be issuing a new version of standards in early 2006--these are not new standards, but the new document will contain some revisions of wording, especially within the context sections.

Of course I learned lots of other things as well, which I'll be posting on the blog as time permits. I've recently cleared the blog of older, outdated postings too!

IPEDS and Accreditation

The IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) surveys will no longer be collecting information regarding individual institutions' accreditation status, beginning in the current, 2005-06, academic year. Instead, they will provide a link to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Postsecondary Education page entitled "Postsecondary Educational Institutions and Programs Accredited by Accrediting Agencies..." (http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/), which has a link to a searchable database where one can determine accreditation status for an institution.

A memo regarding upcoming changes to the IPEDS can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/web2000/changes0506.asp. The information above was the only part of this document that related to accreditation.

This is an interesting development, because it seems that if they do not store accreditation information within the IPEDS system, it will not be possible to perform comparison searches across institutions and include accreditation as a variable. On the other hand, the database offered by the Office of Postsecondary Education is indeed a fine and reliable tool, so the information is still available, but not aggregated into one spot for ease of comparison.

Information Literacy and Accreditation Agencies

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has a page on their site entitled "Information Literacy and Accreditation Agencies." The page can be found at http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/acrlinfolit/infolitstandards/infolitaccred/accreditation.htm

Information literacy has become an increasingly important component in higher education accreditation self-studies, and this ACRL page provides an informative overview of different accreditation agencies and their information literacy requirements.

Canadian University Earns U.S. Regional Accreditation

Athabasca University (http://www.athabascau.ca/), known as "Canada's Open University," has earned regional accreditation from the Middle States Association (http://www.msche.org). Athabasca is the first Canadian university to earn U.S. regional accreditation; doing so should help them continue to recruit students from the U.S. and other regions where students recognize the value of an accreditation system in guaranteeing quality in the programs that they invest their time and money in. The university provides distance education programs, as you might have guessed from the mention of "open university."

Canada does not have a regional accreditation system like the United States does. Provincial education ministries help to ensure higher education quality, and many universities seek out specialized accreditation for specific programs, such as a nursing education accreditation for nursing programs. But there are no external organizations providing accreditation services for specific regions as there are in the United States. This achievement by Athabasca University is indeed interesting, and it will be informative to see if any other universities located outside the United States follow their lead.