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Critic Appointed to Accreditation Review Panel
By Gwendolyn Bradley
Anne Neal, executive director of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, has been appointed to the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, a panel that reviews accrediting agencies for the U.S. Department of Education. Neal has been a harsh critic of the accreditation system. In her 2006 testimony to the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, she proposed that the accreditation process be eliminated, saying that "Under the accreditors' watch, colleges have allowed academic standards to slide, grade inflation to mount, and accountability to suffer." The commission, headed by Charles Miller, later issued a report that was critical of accreditation and of academia in general; it proposed that higher education should become more "efficient" through cost cutting and "productivity improvements," and recommended reducing barriers for transfer students, instituting performance benchmarks, and encouraging new education providers, including for-profit institutions and long-distance learning.
Critics have charged that appointments to the review panel have been stacked against the existing system of accreditation. According to an analysis published by Inside Higher Ed, the fifteen-member panel includes, in addition to Neal, three recent appointees with close ties to the White House, two who served as advisers to the chair of the education secretary's higher education commission, and three members representing for-profit higher education, when only about 7 percent of all students attend institutions in that sector. The panel's makeup is important because it judges the performance of accrediting agencies, which largely determine whether the students of particular postsecondary institutions are eligible for federal financial aid.
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