GENERAL EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF STUDENT MOBILITY

Accrediting for Curricular Coherence

by Carolyn Prager

If we wish to promote greater curricular coherence in the face of increasing student mobility, then we should seek better forms of cooperation between and among the nation's two- and four-year colleges. Further, we must pay careful attention to the new forces that have come to govern undergraduate transfer, especially shifting labor market trends and state regulations imposed on public colleges and universities. At the same time, though, we should be careful not to overlook the substantial influence wielded by another set of higher education's key players: the regional and professional accrediting agencies. Often the missing link in debates about articulation, these bodies have considerable power either to facilitate or to obstruct holistic approaches to student transfer.

Old habits
Although today's students often migrate from one institution to another, accrediting bodies continue to review programs and schools in isolation, using techniques appropriate to earlier patterns of enrollment and graduation. Both the regional and specialized accreditors tend to focus on how well an individual school or program educates students, with little attention to how well it receives and prepares them for transfer. In short, the accreditors elicit mono-dimensional reviews that do little to support inter-institutional responsibility for the curriculum.

Simply put, the accreditation agencies have not yet recognized the growing importance of transfer from two-year to four-year institutions. In fields as diverse as nursing, court reporting, paralegal studies, and early childhood education, the bachelor's degree has begun to supplant the certificate or associate degree for career entry. Almost all of today's knowledge workers require the baccalaureate for even modest workplace advancement. But many of the accreditors continue to enunciate different academic criteria for the two-year degree and the first two years of the four-year degree, even in identical or related fields, and even within the same region. Thus, they impede equitable transition of career and technical students into baccalaureate programs. Those who complete their applied associate degrees often enter four-year institutions with less than full junior status and with less exposure to the intellectual competencies required for advanced study.

The accreditation community also bears some responsibility for the relative absence of general education reform within the two-year institutions. To begin with, the various specialized accreditors have established very different and often contradictory standards for general education. They require one set of core courses for nursing, another for business, another for engineering, and so on. For the community colleges that sponsor a large number of career and technical programs, this profusion of requirements makes it extremely difficult to define a coherent general education program.

Further, the accrediting community has yet to speak out forcefully against the depressing effects of state transfer compacts on general education reform. On the positive side, such compacts guarantee full junior status to community college graduates who have followed specific course and credit guidelines (usually the traditional arts and science requirements). However, as Robert Shoenberg argues, such compacts not only deter community college faculty from designing an ambitious curriculum but they also exclude their students from those more sophisticated and thoughtful approaches to general education available to many four-year students.

Accreditation's potential
If they created more demanding expectations of transfer activity, accrediting agencies could reframe the questions we ask (and the answers we receive) about curriculum coherence and student mobility. For example, how might colleges and universities respond if accreditors were to pay more attention to the effects upon students of incongruent curriculum standards in the first two years of applied programs at two- and four-year colleges? Or the effects of transfer compacts that bind two-year colleges, but not four-year schools, to static curriculum models? Or the ways that each institution's programs do or do not mesh with the programs offered at schools from which it receives or to which it sends students?

Indeed, the accrediting community has enormous potential to set an agenda that would hold all institutions more accountable for student progress to the four-year degree. Even within current purviews, accrediting bodies could modify policies and practices to define a more holistic framework for transfer and articulation in some or all of the following ways:

1. By broadening the definition of "peer" reviewers: While students may experience a broad universe of teaching institutions and modalities on the way to the baccalaureate, accrediting agencies still tend to restrict the definition of "peer" reviewers to those from like institutions. Rigid sector-based definitions of peer review undermine basic concepts of academic parity and transfer acceptance within the first two years of undergraduate education. The participation of individuals from other institutional types could enhance reviews by providing perspectives of those with a prior, current, or future vested interest in student preparation. Therefore, regional and programmatic accreditors might consider routine inclusion of faculty and administrators from other sectors on visiting teams, especially on teams visiting schools with large and mobile student populations.

2. By seeking evidence of strong transfer advocacy: In addition to looking at how community colleges prepare students for transfer, the review process might consider how two- and four-year schools advocate for the transfer student. As an extension of transfer education, community colleges could take more pre- and post-transfer responsibility for guiding and monitoring students' applications through the transfer maze, intervening for them with the receiving institution, if necessary, to forestall potential arbitrary credit loss. Senior colleges could also provide transfer arbiters to negotiate for the student, in the event of transfer disputes.

3. By requiring evidence of holistic articulation activity: Depending on the review agency or team, current accrediting processes may or may not look at some of the factors contributing to better transfer and articulation within a given program or institution. However, in assessing student mobility and curricular coherence, the whole is vastly greater than the sum of its parts. Requiring demonstration of holistic rather than discrete articulation activity could generate review outcomes that cultivate more inter-institutional and inter-sector sharing of responsibility. For example, accreditors might ask: Do institutions assure that transfer students receive the credit status promised by these agreements? Do they negotiate inter-institutional agreements? Do program faculty consider connection and continuity in curriculum development, evaluation, and revision, and do they discuss these matters with faculty from neighboring institutions?

4. By improving two- to four-year program parity: Regional accreditors could require two- and four-year colleges to demonstrate that they share responsibility for curricular coherence. And professional accreditors could require the same of career and technical programs, ensuring that the first two years of a degree aim toward similar outcomes at all institutions. Further, they could raise the intellectual standards of those programs by requiring them to integrate the goals of general education into all parts of the curriculum. After all, specialized courses contain ample opportunity for the development of communication, computation, and analytical skills. There is no reason why students cannot debate ethical dilemmas, learn to write persuasively, or inquire into historical trends, for example, while studying agricultural management, computer science, or any other field. Moreover, there is no reason not to seek a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including those who advocate for general education, when assembling a team to review a professional program. In sum, specialized accreditors could help make learning readiness for baccalaureate study a fundamental rather than an incidental purpose of lower division work.

5. By increasing bachelor's degree options for applied associate's degree graduates: Some associate's degree fields lack bachelor's degree counterparts, and some associate's degree graduates require a four-year degree in a different field for career mobility. Accrediting agencies could help these students by encouraging more "downward articulation," whereby four-year schools design ways to build upon an existing two-year program, linking it to a bachelor's degree curriculum. For example, an associate's degree in almost any health science field could fulfill many of the requirements for a bachelor's in health services administration.

Towards curricular congruence
Nearly every state has intervened to protect the public's interest in easing access to the baccalaureate, often by resorting to artificial measures that transfer credit and competencies between and among institutions of higher education. This amounts to an intrusion into curriculum matters previously understood to belong to the academy. For higher education to tolerate curricular intrusion of this sort is strangely at odds with its fundamental principles of voluntary self-regulation and improvement through peer review. Accreditation has enormous potential to restore control over the curriculum to the academic community, but only by redefining responsibility within new and emerging contexts. In an era of student mobility, that will require setting high expectations for inter-institutional collaboration, and it will require that all schools be held responsible for mapping more coherent pathways to the baccalaureate.