The field of education is undergoing one of the most significant transformations of our time driven by students, parents, and a general populace who want to see a concrete and measurable return on their investment of money, time, and effort. As prospective students evaluate their many options, they struggle to connect their learning experiences to specific learning outcomes, assess the quality of an academic offering, and fully size up their expected commitment as aspiring learners. Few systemic tools exist today to assist prospective students with making informed decisions. However, these tools are rapidly evolving, although they remain largely obscured from the general public.
Not too long ago accreditation, largely invisible to consumers of educational services, served one single purpose for academic institutions – ensure their students’ access to federal funds. Today, progressive academia sees accreditation as an opportunity to collectively improve the delivery of educational services. Accreditation is a communal affair as institutions coalesce under an accreditor’s umbrella to establish and advance the accreditation standards that would govern them. As universities strive to prove their worth to the increasingly skeptical public, they look to their accreditors to come up with innovative ways to enable the processes, systems and reporting that could make it easier to demonstrate the value of learning as measured by students’ progress and learning outcomes. This, in turn, will support and further the culture of continuous improvement in education
The concept of continuous improvement has been coming up in today’s academia with increased frequency. Some institutions have made substantial progress in instilling this culture institution-wide, while others are struggling to define what continuous improvement means to them and how it can be enabled. Accreditation applies to all and can serve as an industry-wide, or field-wide, platform to define the concept of continuous improvement, “sell” it too often skeptical and change adverse academia, and devise the processes to enable the transition to such a highly dynamic approach to advancing education.
Accreditors are stepping up to the task and are hard at work to advance their thinking and approach, innovate their systems, and redefine their collaboration with accredited institutions. We should all look forward to new exciting developments in the accreditation field as accreditors work to make continuous improvement in education a reality.