How Technology Could Modernize Accreditation in Higher Education

Wes Smith (01:20.952)
Hey Allison, good to see ya. Welcome to the podcast.

Alison Griffin (01:31.353)
Great to see you, Wes. Thanks for having me.

Wes Smith (01:34.488)
Hey, I I know you’ve been doing a lot of thinking around accreditation. And we we’ve had we have you on the show to talk through a little bit about accreditation and about large cycle, what’s happening in higher education, especially in terms of technology and how that’s impacting everything. And that’s a kind of a new conversation for us. What what is technology doing in terms of accreditation? You’ve done some thinking on that. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve done there?

Alison Griffin (02:04.144)
Absolutely. So about a year ago, I was asked by the American Enterprise Institute to write a policy paper on a topic of my choosing related to accreditation. And the thing that struck me most about accreditation was that we don’t often talk about technology when it comes to quality assurance. And so I asked my colleagues at AEI if I could actually explore this concept in a little bit more depth. And so as I got in

To that research, that desk research, I started to uncover that there are a number of industries that rely on technology for their quality assurance frameworks and their processes in a much more intimate way than what any of our accreditors across the higher education landscape do today. And so I took the pen, truly pen to paper, and started writing on this topic. And what I uncovered.

was was pretty interesting, particularly when it comes to documentation that our institutions are creating and producing for the quality review process.

Wes Smith (03:16.758)
It it doesn’t surprise me that education isn’t on the cutting edge of quality assurance monitoring using technology, but what are some industries that that you found were more on the cutting edge?

Alison Griffin (03:29.26)
absolutely. So, well, the two that I spent some time exploring in depth were healthcare, not a surprise, and financial services, also not a surprise. The similarities with healthcare is that they have a joint commission that actually evolved from episodic site visits to ongoing quality assurance indicators.

one of the examples that I was able to learn a lot more about was at Johns Hopkins. They run this patient flow dashboard with 10 KPIs, and administrators are able to spot quickly bottlenecks instead of seeing that months later. And so I just started thinking about what if we were to apply that same concept in the institution context. You know, all of our institutions have.

KPIs or strategy frameworks, they all show up differently. But what if you actually built a dashboard where you started to see some of those bottlenecks in the data that might be coming through? You know, whether they’re financial indicators or whether it’s staff transition or even student enrollment numbers, where institutions could be a little bit more just in time responsive as opposed to months or years later.

catching some of these issues.

Wes Smith (04:59.054)
I love in in higher ed, we take our accreditations seriously. And there are so many people that want to see accreditation to protect, you know, consumers. That being said, there is no more important industry for quality assurance than healthcare. It it is literally life and death in healthcare. And and those KPIs are saving people’s lives, right? They’re saying, hey, we have a problem here. We need fast intervention.

And so you it sounds like what you’re saying is if it’s good enough for for financial services, if it’s good enough for the healthcare sector, why aren’t we taking some notes from that and figuring out how we can have faster intervention in higher education? Does that sound about right?

Alison Griffin (05:44.901)
That sounds about right. I, you know, I think today our creditors are asking institutions essentially like, how can we help you make your case? Whereas I started asking the question, like, what do the data actually show? And so, what do the data show? How can we start looking at the outcomes of our institutions instead of trying to fit into

What our quality assurance framework wants us to be.

Wes Smith (06:18.774)
Right, right. Okay, so if you’re if you’re applying this to accreditation and you’re you’re saying, okay, we have so much information, we can we can review it, you know, as in real time, essentially, and we can have faster remedies for troubling situations. Can you give us an example or two about what higher education is in a position to monitor right now?

on a regular basis that we don’t monitor.

Alison Griffin (06:50.64)
Sure. I’d like to start by just giving your listeners an example that I laid out in the paper. And that was my review of some Department of Education records and the requirement that they have for agencies, so the accreditation agency, to produce documentation on what they’re doing. And the example was one of the

regional accreditors, I guess now operating, of course, across regions, produced over 800,000 pages for their review. So you think about even half of that, right? We’ll take 400,000 pages. A single reviewer who is reading 40 pages an hour, it’s gonna take them five years to do that work.

Wes Smith (07:43.362)
That is wild.

Alison Griffin (07:45.307)
Right. And so that’s that’s the and this is probably not a topic for today’s conversation, but you know, that’s the federal government’s oversight of the accreditor. And then you think about the accreditors’ oversight of all the institutions and or programs in its purview. And so if if if our agencies, our accrediting agencies aren’t staffed to be able to do

You know, this review, we are leaving institutions without a review that provides them with the feedback and opportunity for improvement that they may actually be seeking. And so your question about, you know, what what could technology aid in right now? There are a couple of things I feel like our institutions are ready broadly to do.

So completion and retention from a disaggregated with a disaggregated approach. We are already collecting a lot of that information. It’s already broadly comparable. Those are some of our leading indicators that our institutions are looking at. So your retention drop shows up years before your graduation rate does. Great. So we can check that box. Economic outcomes.

I think done really carefully, the measure to emphasize is actually the value-added earnings, the wage gain an institution generates relative to their cost of attendance, you know, not just raw graduate salaries. So, how do we start looking at some of those value-added metrics? And of course, there are institutions and systems that are starting to do that work, certainly given the federal rule changes around accountability.

I think we’re gonna start seeing that data emerge more readily. So that would be the second thing.

Wes Smith (09:43.51)
Right. I I love the focus on outcomes. accreditation has, you know, this this traditional approach, generally speaking, of taking a lot of time to review inputs. And getting to the outputs seems to be the most important thing we can do. You’ve named one that I think is just the highest level.

Output that you can measure, which is economic gain. You know, what what are the what are the impacts of you know this program from this institution on your bottom line as a consumer? So I think that we’ve we’ve hit on one of the most important outcomes. What other things could could you use technology to skip a lot of the inputs and get directly to the out outputs?

So we can focus on the most important things. Any other thoughts on that?

Alison Griffin (10:42.267)
So absolutely, I think one of I’ve been reading a lot of stories about this recently, but it are the financial health indicators and institutions that for years or in some cases a decade have been suffering through financial ups and downs. Of course, the economy impacts that, state funding, if you’re a public institution. But the surprising part to me is how many institutions now look back and say, wow, we

Could have caught that if we had only seen a full picture, if we could have only done some projections in a way that looked beyond three or five years. And so that financial health indicator, while not a learning outcome, it’s an outcome that students actually care about because it’s whether or not the institution that they’re attending is still going to exist.

One when they’re due to graduate, or two, when they want to come back 20 years as an alum. the other thing that I would suggest is that labor market alignment. So, you know, we have institutions that are collecting data. And in the case of public institutions, we have states and state systems, state agencies that are collecting information. How do we start filtering?

Some of that labor market information through an institutional mission. So I’m not even saying that we have to compare all the institutions in a single state. What if we started looking at them across Carnegie classification? Or we write? And so one, it’s a it’s an opportunity to also share information. I think that’s another place where accreditation could actually reform peer review.

Wes Smith (12:22.892)
Yeah. Interesting.

Alison Griffin (12:35.589)
I wouldn’t say we need to get rid of peer review. We need to leverage peer review in a wholly different way. So if you use technology to get after some of these indicators, get after your outcomes, you see a dip in performance. Wouldn’t you want to leverage the people in the network of higher education who are doing an excellent job at that indicator to come and be a collaborator with your

Wes Smith (13:03.17)
Yeah, absolutely.

Alison Griffin (13:04.177)
to improve on that outcome.

Wes Smith (13:06.604)
Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. some of our listeners out there, especially those who are very familiar with accreditation, I know what they’re saying right now. They’re saying, well, yeah, you can monitor some things, but you can’t monitor everything that accreditors do using technology. There are some parts of quality control that aren’t continuous. You know, there are new programs, there are, you know, seasonal enrollment, some things like that.

So what do you think the exception for continuous monitoring and input would be in the accreditation process, if there are any?

Alison Griffin (13:47.826)
So you’re asking of like the things that might be hard to standardize using another term. I actually I do believe it that one of the things that is hardest to standardize are the learning outcomes themselves, to be really honest. Like we don’t have a valid sort of comparable measure of what students actually learn across 4,000 wildly different institutions. And so pretending that we do.

Wes Smith (13:52.813)
Yes.

Alison Griffin (14:17.497)
Is almost like worse than admitting that we don’t. and so I I think that there is still room for improvement when it comes to those actual learning outcomes. And so I think recognizing that from the very beginning is really important. I would also say, you know, in in this environment of disagreeing better, you know, long-run sort of civic and just personal outcomes.

You know, the way in which people are finishing their program of study and contributing to their local community. I think that one, that’s not really something that accreditation is measuring now in a in a comprehensive way. And I do think that that’s something that is still hard to get after. So it’s almost like that return on investment that is fundamental to community building, I think is is really hard.

Wes Smith (15:16.226)
Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s that’s I I don’t see accreditation doing a lot of work in that area right now, but it you’re saying it it that’s a possibility.

Alison Griffin (15:16.266)
Alison Griffin (15:25.421)
Saying it’s I think it’s important, and I don’t know that it’s the role of accreditation. I think I’m saying that that is something that is still hard to standardize. I’m not sure that I would want accreditation to standardize that, but it would be interesting in this environment. again, where I think there is

opportunity for people when they disagree and they know how to disagree in a civil way than disagreeing uncivily and in an uncivil way. And I don’t know how we’re capturing that, but I think it would be important to to have a glimpse into that a little bit better than we do now.

Wes Smith (15:59.458)
Right. Yeah.

Wes Smith (16:08.3)
Yeah, it’s certainly a big issue in our society today. Okay, I’m gonna give you the last word on this. you you’ve done some thinking on it, we’ve talked through it. what would you say to our listeners is you know, your top takeaway and learning from from healthcare and financial services and other industries that we could bring and apply to higher education?

Alison Griffin (16:34.033)
So I would thank you for the last word. so I think the continua the idea of continuous monitoring should change behavior. So addressing problems before they become a crisis, not attempting to create a whole new compliance industry. And so my charge would be leverage technology where it can help make the process better.

For the learner and for the outcome, not adding another layer of compliance for the institution.

Wes Smith (17:09.358)
A fantastic on point for the president’s forum. You know, this idea of using technology to advance accreditation, make it more more relevant to the learner. That is right on message for the things that we’re working on in the forum. And we appreciate your insight on this and thanks for joining us today.

Alison Griffin (17:27.173)
Thanks for having me.

Wes Smith (17:30.454)
Okay.