Many industries can be slow to institute change, but perhaps none is more notorious for the slow pace of change than the world of academia. There are many different issues at play when it comes to adapting, among them the fact that there are so many stakeholders, all in different departments or schools within a university. What works for one part of the institution might not work for another, and it is hard to build the consensus in which leaders feel comfortable bringing about changes.
When it comes to accreditation, the work is already tedious because there are different levels of licensure at the state, regional, and federal level. It is an important process, holding schools accountable for the work they say they are doing, and how well they adhere to their mission, but it is a process that involves a lot of people and can take years to complete. Some people in higher education believe data can help speed up the process.
What does the accreditation process look like?
There can be variations, but typically an accreditation process is made up of a self-study, followed by a peer review, and then a decision by the governing body. The self-study is a collaborative effort across an institution. Schools evaluate their performance in all areas – from administrative offices to each academic field – against the standards being measured by the accrediting body. The self-study is then used as the guide for an independent panel made up of a group of people from different universities. They usually visit the school, assess whether the information in the self-study is accurate, and submit their own report to the accrediting body.
Following the decision whether a school is granted, denied, or deferred accreditation (or re-accreditation, as the case may be), a school must perform follow-up evaluations. This has to happen every 10 years or so in the reaccreditation cycle, but there is also work that has to be done in the years before that to prove a school is continuing to do the work it says it is doing.
Changing with the times
The accreditation process has changed somewhat over the years, as colleges and universities have shifted to meet student needs. In the years since the pandemic, there has been an increase in online classes, and more students have followed a non-traditional path to a college degree. Colleges and universities have gotten creative with some of their offerings in order to remain competitive. As they have done so, they have had to think about the evaluation of such methods to ensure that their classes, teaching, and assessment all meet the same academic standards they work to achieve across the rest of the institution. In some cases, evaluators have also adjusted the questions they ask to ensure schools are holding themselves to a high standard when they make such changes to their offerings.
What can data and analytics offer for the accreditation process?
Often when schools conduct their self-study, they are starting from scratch. New data is gathered and put into reports and presented for assessment. In some cases, this is simply because it’s the way the process has always been done, and in others, it is because the technological infrastructure is not set up in a way that makes the data-gathering as easy a process as it could be.
Institutions are beginning to realize that there is an easier way. The right analytics solution can be customized to provide organization-wide data that can help improve the reporting process. Not only can the technology make it easier to produce the reports that are essential to an accreditation, but for the intervening years all of the follow-up reporting can also be made easier. School leaders can access real-time updates rather than gathering information after the fact.
Working with the right technology partner can provide a school with exactly the right solution. Not only can it be adjusted later if there is different data that needs to be collected, but it can also handle the wide variety of sources from which the data comes, a problem often seen in higher education as different schools and widespread campuses often have different systems in which data lives.
These days, the accreditation process has become even more essential to colleges and universities, as schools with questionable credentials pop up making promises to students that they can’t deliver on. Students and parents are examining a school’s accreditation to make sure it is from an organization they can trust before they make their sizable investment in higher education. A school needs to make sure it is exacting when it comes to handling its accreditation, but there’s no reason that process has to drag out. With the right analytics solution, it can change the stereotype about how slow processes in academia move.
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