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Wednesday, June 16, 2010

House Hearing on Program Length and Accreditation � The Quick and the Ed

House Hearing on Program Length and Accreditation � The Quick and the Ed

House Hearing on Program Length and Accreditation

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and Labor is holding a hearing on program length and accreditation. This deals with the scathing and highly redacted memo (PDF) that the U.S. Department of Education’s Inspector General sent to the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) last December. The Inspector General recently followed that memo up with a longer report in late May (PDF) that recommend considering terminating HLC’s job as an accreditor.
For those who are interested in more of the context about this hearing, here is what I wrote about the alert memo and its findings after talking to the related parties back in April:
We now know that the accreditor’s concerns about AIU stemmed from the school’s offering of 9 credits for individual undergraduate and graduate courses, mostly in the business department—classes that the alert memo refers as being “inflated in credit.” According to Jeff Leshay, a spokesperson for Career Education Corporation, AIU’s parent company, these were either accelerated courses that could be completed by students in five weeks or students could pass two of them simultaneously over the course of 10 weeks. A total of 186 undergraduate courses featured

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