In December, the U.S. Department of Education’s Inspector General (IG) called on the Department to consider terminating the authority of the nation’s largest regional accreditation agency because it had accredited a major chain of for-profit universities despite findings that raised serious questions about the quality of training the institution was providing. Since then, officials at the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools have been vigorously fighting back, arguing that the IG seriously misrepresented their actions.
At issue was the commission’s decision last May to give “full initial accreditation without limitation” to the Career Education Corporation’s American Intercontinental University (AIU) despite concluding that the school had significantly -- and, in the words of the commission’s reviewers, “egregiously” -- inflated the course credits it was providing to its large population of online students. The IG, in a blistering report in December, said that the agency’s action called “into question whether the accrediting decisions made by HLC should be relied upon by the Department of Education, when assisting students to obtain quality education through the Title IV [student aid] programs.”
In her official response, which the IG released this week as part of its final report on the case (starting on p.19), Sylvia Manning, the commission’s president, said she disagreed “profoundly with the conclusions drawn by the Inspector General’s team.” She particularly blasted the IG for suggesting that the agency had not placed “conditions and limitations” on AIU in reaction to the findings. Manning wrote that, among other things, the commission had required the school to conduct a self-study on the awarding of credit hours in preparation for a focused site visit from the agency in the 2010-11 academic year. The accreditor also required the institution to seek the commission’s approval before starting any new degree programs or sites. “These restrictions were intended to force change and to force it quickly,” she stated.
Career Education Corporation has, in fact, recently changed its policy, cutting the credits it awards for AIU's online classes in half – from 9 to 4.5 credits per course. This shows, she argued, that “the Commission’s approach works":
The Commission’s evaluation team identified a significant problem with the awarding of academic credit in a small percentage of online upper-division courses offered by the institution. The team outlined a regime of monitoring to result in prompt remediation of the problem. A Commission evaluation team has been on campus this winter to ensure that prompt action is indeed being taken by the institution to ameliorate the problem. The online upper-division students of AIU attending an institution with a twenty-year history of regional accreditation will be benefiting from this change, which, with the Commission’s intervention, might not have taken place or at least not as quickly.
But the IG does not buy Manning’s explanation, and at Higher Ed Watch, neither do we.