Recent Florida legislation (SPB 7044) should be viewed with much concern and with skepticism as to the intent of the bill and its unintended consequences. The bill requires state colleges and universities to seek reaffirmation from different accrediting organizations at the end of each review cycle. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation…

The COVID-19 pandemic has dominated news, lives, daily conditions of families, economic social infrastructures, political upheavals, and international relations and has disjointed all norms associated with higher education. Universities of all sizes, demographics, and varying cultural identities or Carnegie classification scramble every day to…

Recent state legislative developments have brought accreditation to the forefront of public higher education conversations. Some accreditation critics state that accreditors have too much influence in higher education suggesting that their efforts may affect institutional autonomy and that they are allegedly structured as legalized monopolies…

Beyond the opportunity of crisis, the climate is favorable for major change in quality review. This report presents five specific steps that can lead to reinventing review of quality in higher education, a post-COVID redesign of accreditation and quality assurance that, if effective, will establish a foundation for the next era of these important…

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a national, nongovernmental membership organization of degree-granting colleges and universities, the only organization with the sole purpose of providing national coordination of accreditation of higher education institutions and programs. CHEA serves as an advocate, national authority and…

Human beings are compulsive learners. Strong demographic and economic factors coincide with this natural desire to learn. This current paper focuses on quality aspects of shorter-term educational experiences. What features determine quality? What type of quality reviews would be most suitable? Are accreditation and quality assurance as they have…

This report presents findings from a 2018 survey, CHEA Survey of Accrediting Organizations, administered by NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC), an independent research organization, on behalf of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). The purpose was to gather insights from accrediting organizations about their recent…

This survey and its findings provide a comprehensive look at U.S. recognized institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations and what they report about how they address the challenge of innovation with quality in higher education. Conducted for the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) by NORC at the University of Chicago in…

COVID-19 has been powerful as a driver of the expanded reliance on distance learning and the concern about financial viability. Race has been the primary driver of greater attention to equity. Three issues -- large-scale distance learning, financial fragility and race and equity -- are driving the immediate future of accreditation, perhaps leading…

It is a time of disruption, in politics and government, in many national economies and cultures. In the United States, disruption has also penetrated the accreditation space, with debates and differences about student achievement, access and affordability and transparency, topics also challenging quality assurance around the world. Higher…

The world of higher education has been changing rapidly over the last 30 years with the move to mass education due to the needs of the knowledge economy for an appropriately skilled labour force and driven by continuous advances in technology. The purpose of this publication is to provide an overview of how quality assurance (QA) bodies are…

The purpose of this report is to profile a selection of emerging approaches to judging quality in higher education that represent a range of stakeholder interests and perspectives. This report is divided into three sections. "Quality Assurance at a Crossroads" highlights perceived challenges for the U.S. accreditation system in a…

The purpose of this Council for Higher Education Accreditation Position Paper is to offer proposals for the reduction of federal regulation as this applies to accreditation, whether in law, regulation or sub-regulatory guidance, acknowledging that the major challenge is at the regulatory/subregulatory levels. This reduction is not intended nor…

Academic corruption in its different forms is not a new phenomenon. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) has been active in addressing this area for a number of years. In cooperation with UNESCO, it issued an "Advisory Statement on Discouraging Degree Mills" (see ED603204). The document was prepared for the 2009 UNESCO…

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation/International Quality Group (CHEA/CIQG) issued its "International Quality Principles" and an accompanying collection of essays [see ED569216] in May 2015 and January 2016. The "Principles" are presented as a basis for international deliberation of quality in higher education. The…