ACTA President Anne D. Neal provided testimony to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions at their June 17 hearing on higher education accreditation, chaired by Senator Lamar Alexander. Her testimony emphasized the shocking failure of the current system of accreditation to ensure academic quality. She demonstrated the need for a new system—far less intrusive and expensive than the one we now have—that will provide consumer protection and clear information to guide students in the process of selecting a college. President Neal’s testimony, along with ACTA’s publications on accreditation, will form an important part of Congressional deliberations later this year on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. View video of the Senate hearing here.
ACTA has repeatedly documented that the system of higher education accreditation is a barrier to innovation, improvement, and accountability at colleges and universities. On May 29, ACTA President Anne D. Neal demonstrated to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that the inadequacy of accreditation is particularly harmful to socio-economically disadvantaged students. Joining Anne Neal on […]
This policy paper is intended as a primer for policymakers on lessons learned from decades of experience with the federal system of higher education accreditation. It streamlines, updates, and expands ACTA’s 2002 investigation, Can College Accreditation Live Up to Its Promise? At that time we found that accreditation did not ensure quality, was not protecting […]
The federal government’s system for accrediting colleges is a misguided failure that should be largely replaced with a simpler method that relies on key institutional data about cost and quality, a trustees group is arguing. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative-leaning lobbying association led by Anne D. Neal, proposed in a report […]
In the year since Education Secretary Margaret Spellings formally embraced the work of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education and began her efforts to carry out its work, no topic has been more at the forefront than the system of regional and national accreditation that higher education, the government and states use to […]
On June 13, 2013, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Higher Education and the Workforce held a hearing focusing on accreditation. The hearing – “Keeping College Within Reach: Program Quality through Accreditation” – featured testimony from Elizabeth Sibolski, President of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, Michale McComis, Executive Director and Chief Executive […]
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