The Accreditation Overhaul Is Only Getting Started

With less than a week before public comments close on the Department of Education’s sweeping rewrite of accreditation regulations on Sept. 21, Inside Higher Ed’s editor in chief, Sara Custer, spoke with Maria Toyoda, president and CEO of the WASC Senior College and University Commission, about the plans in a new episode of the Key podcast. 

Toyoda shares her concerns about the extent to which the changes could erode accreditors’ independence. “No one should feel bad for accreditors,” she said. “If we have to implement new policies and guidance in order to do … reviews and evaluations, we’ll do that. It’s our job.”

“We are less comfortable with entering into a new kind of relationship where we’re saying to the institutions, ‘Well, we’re also going to tell you how [to meet the standards].’ That’s not really our part as WASC or where we come from,” she said. 

Despite the scale of the regulation rewrite, which also includes accreditors ensuring institutions ease student credit transfer and are held to greater account for student outcomes, Toyoda said the real impact of the regulations will depend on how the department implements them. “The regulatory stuff and the statutory stuff—it’s not that they’re not important; they’re very important. But what people I think don’t often see is that underneath them there are all kinds of templates and forms and handbooks and manuals,” she said. “In any regulatory area, there are so many ways in which you promulgate and implement regulation that there are so many opportunities in different places that people can look to influence the way a certain rule is administered.”

And even if the department finalizes the rules by Nov. 1, that will not be the end of the debate around accreditation; Toyoda expects the administration to announce another round of negotiated rule making soon.

Still, WASC is preparing for the overhaul. “I have about a 38-page change document that that we’re working through,” she said. “We’ve got our committees, particularly around the policy changes, making sure that we have the policies ready to go as needed.”

Listen to the full episode here.