\n<\/p>\n
Earlier this week the presidents of three of the formerly regional accreditors\u2014Middle States, SACSCOC and WASC\u2014hosted a webinar on AI and transfer credit. I watched, as did several colleagues; both topics are important, and since we\u2019re covered by Middle States, it\u2019s useful to know where its policies and expectations are heading. Credit loss upon transfer is a chronic issue on which accreditors have historically been muted; serious attention would be welcome.<\/p>\n
It was\u00a0\u2026 frustrating My colleagues and I tried afterward to isolate actual concrete changes and came away befuddled. It reminded me a bit of \u201cstrategic plans\u201d that say things like, \u201cWe will achieve excellence.\u201d OK, but that\u2019s neither a strategy nor a plan. At best, it\u2019s an intention. <\/p>\n
Heather Perfetti, the president of MSCHE, stated that she doesn\u2019t want accreditors to be seen as barriers to credit transfer; if anything, they\u2019re urging a shift in the burden of proof for credit transfer from yes to no. That\u2019s good, as far as it goes, but the key word is \u201curging.\u201d Urging is not requiring. Kay McClenney famously noted that \u201cstudents don\u2019t do optional.\u201d I\u2019ve seen too many cases of universities not doing optional when it comes to accepting credits in transfer.<\/p>\n
The stated reason is usually something about standards; the real reason is economic self-interest. Departments don\u2019t want to \u201cgive away\u201d any more credits than they have to, so they don\u2019t. That changes only when orders come down from above\u2014say, from a provost\u2019s office because the college is desperate for enrollment, or from a State Legislature that got sick of shenanigans and passed a law, like MassTransfer in Massachusetts. Accreditors could conceivably play that role\u2014it would be na\u00efve to think that outcomes assessment would have gained the momentum it did without pressure from accreditors\u2014but they\u2019d have to put some force behind it. I\u00a0didn\u2019t catch any mention of that.<\/p>\n
To be fair to the accreditors, that\u2019s much harder now that they\u2019ve lost their de facto regional monopolies. The regional accreditors are membership-driven organizations whose imprimatur opens up access to federal financial aid. Membership-driven organizations aren\u2019t normally tough on their members, but the unusual combination of regional monopoly and access to federal financial aid gave them the leverage to push their members harder than they otherwise could. That didn\u2019t always work out ideally\u2014some colleges went bankrupt having recently satisfied accreditors that they were financially sound\u2014but the structure made it at least possible for the accreditors to carry real weight.<\/p>\n
The first Trump administration broke the regional monopolies and opened the door to alternative accreditors. Now there\u2019s an entirely new body emerging in SACS\u2019s territory, and colleges are empowered to shop around. When members can shop around for more lenient or ideologically aligned accreditors, it becomes more difficult for the legacy accreditors to issue mandates. <\/p>\n
The new preference\u2014I can\u2019t call it a mandate or a policy\u2014seems to mean that colleges should \u201cdefault to yes\u201d on credit transfer, in the absence of evidence that they shouldn\u2019t. It wasn\u2019t immediately clear what would constitute evidence that they shouldn\u2019t. Lack of regional accreditation isn\u2019t supposed to be dispositive in itself. Over time, a college could track success rates of students in Calc II who transferred in Calc I from College\u00a0X, and if the rate were low enough, they could cite that. But that would require first allowing everything in for several years to build a track record; after that, the politics of saying no would be more complicated. <\/p>\n
The connection to AI, as near as I could tell, was that it would allow colleges to assess transcripts and issue transfer decisions much more quickly at scale. That would actually help. As one of the presidents put it\u2014I\u00a0should have written it down, but alas\u2014the current system works like trading in a car for a new one but not being told the value of your trade-in until you\u2019ve had the new one for a few months. It\u2019s not consumer-friendly at all. If transfer credit decisions could be issued at the same time as admission and financial aid decisions, students would be much more able to make informed decisions. I have concerns about AI hallucinations in this context (and many others), but if defaulting to yes is built in, it might work at least as well as the current system. <\/p>\n
So, I\u2019ll give this shift a cheer and a half out of three. The direction is positive; I just hope they can find a way to move from an intention to a plan. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Earlier this week the presidents of three of the formerly regional accreditors\u2014Middle States, SACSCOC and WASC\u2014hosted a webinar on AI and transfer credit. I watched, as did several colleagues; both topics are important, and since we\u2019re covered by Middle States, it\u2019s useful to know where its policies and expectations are heading. Credit loss upon transfer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27526,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[3215,8043,1228],"class_list":{"0":"post-27525","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-changing","9":"tag-default","10":"tag-setting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}