By Professor Doom
Time and again
I’ve pointed out how accreditation has been taken over by the same bloated and
overpaid administration that’s destroying higher education. One of the biggest
signs of this is the dwindling faculty on campus; although the student base of
many of our universities and colleges has doubled, and doubled again, full time
faculty positions have dropped, and pay has been flat for the teachers despite
the increasing workload, even as administrative positions and pay continue to
skyrocket.
Memo from
Admin: Please remember your syllabus is a legal contract. Unless I don't like
your grading, then I will go into the system and change grades.
--Supposedly a joke tweet from an associate dean. That
said, I doubt I’m only one who has worked under admin who honestly think this
way…and have done this.
It’s no secret
that administration thinks nothing of faculty, and honestly wishes to get rid
of us. Faculty have a nasty habit of having standards, and think it’s wrong to
cheat students out of their financial lives for personal gain…there’s just no
way for administration to see eye to eye with faculty on matters involving
integrity.
There’s even a
book on how much administration
wants to have faculty-free campuses…imagine what incredible rip-offs a
pure administration campus would be! The gentle reader needs to realize that at
the rate things are going on campus, such will be reality within a few decades,
if not sooner.
Accreditation,
much like everywhere else in higher education, is all about the growth, about
getting more people sucked into paying money for “training” by professionals,
and is forever looking for new ways to get people indebted for basically
nothing. The latest fad is “competency based education.”
Why the sudden
interest in something completely non-academic? Growth, of course, in this case
growth into the “new market” of non-academic education.
It’s a simple fact
that, in all honesty, not everyone is suited for academics. I’m not trying to
be elitist here, I openly admit I’ll never be even a mediocre football player,
and do note that playing football, to judge by how our society distributes
wealth, is considered a far more precious skill than anything academic.
Higher education,
after years of reckless growth due to the student loan scam, is starting to
have a hard time finding suckers young people to sign up for more
student debt. But the Poo Bahs that run our institutions want more growth, and
the people that run our institutions are the same people that run
accreditation.
With no more
growth possible in academics, accreditation is hoping to facilitate growth by
“competency based education.” Hey, don’t get me wrong, competency is
important…but why can’t we just have formal jobs training centers for that? Why
can’t we just do that in the high schools, instead of colleges? Why can’t we
just make competency determined by tests anyone can take? Nobody will even
consider those questions, since answering them honestly would cut into growth…
Anyway,
accreditation set up the regulations for competency based education. Only one
problem: faculty involvement is minimized, so much so that even our clueless
government sees a problem:
Now, I don’t
believe you need some yahoo with 6 years of Education courses to teach
something, but you do need faculty, experts, of some sort to at least determine skill, if not teach it. How did
it happen that accreditation set up their regulations in a way that there would
not be any actual experts to judge the competency?
The office
last year issued an audit that criticized the department’s approval of direct-assessment degrees, which are competency-based credentials that do not
rely on the credit-hour standard. The audit questioned the sufficiency of the
faculty role in those programs, and raised concerns about low-quality providers
entering the space.
It’s no secret
that “low quality providers” are already pretty common in higher education; it
seems every day I read another report of another scammy school, ripping off
students hand over fist…a scammy school that is fully accredited, mind you.
Hey, you want to
know what is a secret? First, an
anecdote:
Faculty:
“So, SACS got the assessment data we’d been gathering. The data was awful,
invalid on every level. Many of the forms were filled out by the same student
five, six, or more times…there was no way to tell between incoming students and
students that had been here years, and yet we told SACS we were using the data
to assess student improvement…some of the forms were actually testing forms
that I’d filled out, to verify the scanner was working…all clumped together in
boxes, no statistics beyond the means…I don’t think anyone in admin even knows
what a standard deviation is…
SACS
praised admin for the data…”
---a
colleague just went through accreditation review at his school, by SACS, the same accreditor of UNC. He’d told me for years that the data his school was
collecting was what we in the statistics biz call “garbage.” I assured him he had
nothing to worry about, that SACs did not care about legitimacy as they
were basically certifying themselves, and didn’t even have the competency to
determine legitimacy in any event. There are many incestuous conflicts of interest in
accreditation, no way submitting fraudulent data would be a problem.
The big secret:
accreditation is a joke. The same non-academic administrators that run our
schools also run accreditation…it’s one of the big reasons that fraudulent
schools can keep on ripping off students year in and year out, with scarcely a
peep from accreditation.
The Higher
Learning Commission, an accreditor, is leading the charge for this new way to
plunder student loan money for schools to grow, but it looks like the
Department of Education is actually going to slow down the rate of plunder:
“We concluded that the Higher Learning Commission did not establish a
system of internal control that provided reasonable assurance that schools’
classifications of delivery methods and measurements of student learning for
competency-based education programs, including direct assessment programs, were
sufficient and appropriate to help the department ensure that it properly
classified the schools’ programs for Title IV purposes,” the report
said…reevaluate competency-based education programs previously proposed by
schools to determine whether interaction
between faculty and students will be regular and substantive,”
--Title IV
is the student loan money. Emphasis added.
So, looks like
faculty-free schools are not happening really soon, at least…but the gentle
reader should know that it will happen at some point, assuming higher education
isn’t completely destroyed first. Would the complete destruction of higher
education be a bad thing? Overall, probably not, but there are still some
legitimate schools out there, and I’d regret their loss.
Naturally, the
Poo Bahs of higher education have no choice but to grin and bear this effort to
restrict their attempts at plunder. As usual, however, when these guys speak
they say nothing, and reveal their lack of understanding:
The audit shows the need for clarity
and more communication on the definitions, requirements and processes for
competency-based education, said Laurie Dodge, vice chancellor of institutional assessment and planning and vice
provost
--Yes, I’ve emphasized that title, as
it is a very typical title of administration. Note the length of the job title satisfies my “get rid of” guideline. Seriously, there are way too many administrators ruling over way too many
fiefdoms in higher education, so many that the titles are now laughably
ridiculous.
Seriously, the Department of Education
says “more interaction between faculty and students,” and admin just spews out
buzzwords in response.
Another Poo Bah (well, a former one) also
has some edu-speak to say in response to the Department of Education’s request
to have actual teachers in their educational programs:
“What we
need is well-considered action with adequate safeguards and appropriate
expectations for demonstrable outcomes to optimize the potential benefits of
competency-based education while effectively stewarding Title IV resources,” he
said. “I know that the institutions that continue to work diligently to assure
development of high-quality competency-based education programs stand ready to
help define just how to get this right.”
Can any normal person read the above
paragraph and extract “we understand you, we’ll have interaction between
teachers and students in these programs” from all the edubabble? I can’t
emphasize strongly enough how horrible the non-academic Poo Bahs have been for
higher education. It really is pathetic that these guys are in charge.
Educators can’t influence education right now, and if the Poo Bahs have their
way, educators can’t even teach students anything, can’t even determine if
students are learning anything.
Now, I’m all for competency-based testing, and I think such tests should
be available to all who wish to attempt them, no coursework (and accompanying
huge tuition bill) required. Unfortunately, I don’t see accreditation or higher
education allowing it. I imagine sooner or later, teacher-free “education” will
be for sale, very expensively, at our institutions of higher education, and not
just in the competency-based programs. The only thing stopping it right now is
government doing its job, and only a fool can think that will last long.
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