Angst for an Accreditor
June 7, 2010
College presidents, faculty/staff unions and state education leaders rarely agree about anything. But mutual frustration with a regional accreditor has united strange bedfellows in California’s community college sector.
The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, which accredits two-year institutions in California, Hawaii and numerous Pacific island nations and territories as part of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, placed 41 (or 37 percent) of the 110 California community colleges on "sanction" from 2003 to 2008. A study of other regional accreditors in the United States shows that, during this same period, the percentage of their community colleges being sanctioned, or warned that their accreditation could be stripped, ranged from 0 to 6 percent. As of January, 18 California community colleges remain on sanction. (Still, in the history of the state, only one two-year institution, Compton Community College, has ever lost its accreditation.)
The unusually large number of penalties for California's community colleges prompted an array of interest groups from the institutions to form a task force last year to study the accreditor's actions; itsrecommendations covered a wide swath of issues but can be summed up as urging the commission to focus on institutional "improvement rather than compliance."
Leaders of the accrediting commission largely rebutted the task force's findings, saying that the agency, in taking a tougher stance on institutional performance, is responding to increased pressure (from the federal government and elsewhere) to hold colleges accountable. ACCJC officials also challenged the extent to which the panel represented the views of the accreditor's members: California's community college presidents. The dispute escalated last month when California's community college chancellor, Jack Scott, writing on behalf of the task force, complained to the U.S. Education Department that the ACCJC was not following its own bylaws in its process for selecting
