How Accreditation Is Cheating U.S. College Students

Americans mostly embrace competitive markets and grasp that less competition means greater rigidity, reduced innovation, and lower quality of products and services. One sector in which people may not realize competition is thwarted is higher education. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to robust, meaningful competition between institutions of higher learning—and certainly an obstacle that few people outside of educational administration understand well—is the system of accreditation, explains Independent Institute Senior Fellow Richard K. Vedder, in a recent column at Forbes.

Accrediting organizations—and there are hundreds of them—are not a completely bad idea. They can, for example, discourage unscrupulous diploma mills, ensuring that colleges and universities meet basic levels of competence. “There are at least nine problems, however, with the current system,” Vedder writes. The system is too complex, costly, secretive, of limited use to students and parents, filled with conflicts of interest, focused more on educational inputs than outcomes, anti-competitive, and the means by which the federal government wielded influence and control over schools.

Consumers get better information from Forbes magazine’s America’s Top Colleges rankings and Department of Education’s College Scorecard than from accrediting organizations, according to Vedder. While a uniform, useful measure of educational product quality and outcomes has yet to be applied to all of the nation’s colleges and programs, this is an idea whose time has come. “At the minimum, accreditation needs to be significantly remodeled—simplified, made transparent, less prone to conflicts of interest, etc.,” Vedder writes. “Perhaps accrediting agencies should be the vehicle for providing far more detailed and consumer-friendly data on such things as student vocational success rates by major, student satisfaction with courses, etc. Then let consumers, not bureaucrats, decide whether the institution is worth attending.”

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California university works to reduce number of white people on campus

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo works on massive diversity and inclusion effort

In keeping with the diversity and inclusion movement sweeping campuses across the country, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo recently released a 30-page report outlining plans to “improve diversity” via a series of initiatives.

One goal is to increase the number of people of color on campus beyond the increases that have already occurred over the past few years, as “applications from underrepresented minority students doubled between 2008 and 2018.”

“In 2011, the campus was 63 percent Caucasian,” the May 2 report informs readers, “in fall of 2017, it was less than 55 percent … but there is still much work to do.”

The public research institution states it wishes to get those numbers more in line with the state’s percentage of white people, which recent polls hold at 39.7 percent of the population.

“To further advance its goals of reflecting the demographics of California and creating a more diverse and inclusive campus community, Cal Poly administration has developed the following Diversity Action Initiatives document,” the report states.

In it, administration details a multi-year effort with dozens of intitiatives, including ones to further lower the percentage of white students on campus and increase the number of faculty of color.

For students, the school plans on recruiting applicants more heavily based on race. For instance, the school has recently implemented several new scholarships “aimed at recruiting more African-American and other underrepresented minorities.” It’s also working to recruit low-income and first-generation students by partnering with high schools that enroll a high percentage of these students, according to the report.

Cal Poly SLO has eliminated applicants’ ability to apply to the school in Early Decision since the process, according to the report, “disadvantaged low-income students.” All applicants, regardless of their level of interest in the school, are viewed in one big pool in regular decision admissions.

And the college announced its intention of forcibly increasing diversity in “traditionally male-dominated majors” such as STEM and Architecture and Environmental Design, according to the document.

For faculty, the university states diversity will be a criterion considered in cluster hiring faculty “every other year.” And the university has received $150,000 from the Cal State University system “for a cluster hire of up to 10 faculty positions that focus on diversity and inclusion in a variety of scholarly areas throughout the university’s six colleges.”

This fall campus leaders will “require a diversity statement from candidates for all faculty and staff searches,” the report states. It adds that search committees will now be made up of diverse membership and Academic Affairs has “set [an] expectation that search committees will be based on best practices regarding diversity.”

Meanwhile, many initiatives remain in the offing.

For instance, the document calls for the implementation of a “pre-enrollment diversity training for new first-year and transfer students.” This “diversity training” will be in addition to the two mandatory orientation programs — “SLO Days” and “Weeks of Welcome.”

Additionally, “Poly Reps”—the Cal Poly ambassadors who provide campus tours to potential applicants—must now receive mandatory diversity training. Spokesperson Matt Lazier tells The College Fix “unconscious biases could inadvertently come into play” when they gave tours.

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U.K.: Chief school inspector accuses minority groups of 'entitlement' in hijab row

The head of Ofsted has again stepped into the debate over the wearing of the hijab by primary school pupils, accusing minority groups with a “sense of religious or cultural entitlement” of attempting to exert an outsize influence on school policy.

In a speech on Monday evening, Amanda Spielman urged school leaders to resist pressure on issues such as what children should wear or what is taught to pupils.

She highlighted a “worrying” trend in schools where headteachers were being lobbied by groups seeking to influence school policy “whether or not members of that group constitute the majority of a school’s intake”.

The importance of teaching British values in schools has become a familiar theme in the 18 months since Spielman . In her latest intervention, she urged headteachers to step up their efforts so children learn about democracy and civil society, rather than leaving a vacuum that can be filled by extremist groups.

Spielman has previously attracted criticism for her comments about the wearing of the headscarf by Muslim girls as young as five. Last year, she announced Ofsted inspectors had been told to  wearing a hijab, warning that expecting pupils to wear the headscarf “could be interpreted as sexualisation of young girls”.

She also came under fire for her intervention in the case of St Stephen’s, a state primary school in east London, where the  pupils from wearing the hijab in class after an outcry from parents and others. Spielman vociferously argued it was up to headteachers to set uniform rules.

In her speech to the Policy Exchange thinktank in London, she said for some children “school may be the only time in their lives that they spend time every day with people from outside their immediate ethnic or religious group, or at least where the values of people outside their own group can be explained and openly discussed”.

She said: “Islamist extremists, particularly fuelled by the online propaganda of Daesh [Islamic State] and others, prey on a sense of isolation and alienation in some minority communities.”

Earlier this year, teachers at the annual conference of the National Education Union accused Spielman of  to girls wearing the hijab and said her remarks had gone beyond the remit of the schools’ watchdog.

In her latest foray, the chief inspector of schools in England took a defiant stance, insisting that Ofsted had a vital role in making sure that schools promote British values and vowing to continue to call out poor practice.

“For many people, the things I have been talking about today are too sensitive and too difficult for them to want to risk giving offence. They are easy things to skirt, yet the risk of doing so is great,” she said. “If we leave these topics to the likes of the English Defence League and British National party on the one hand and Islamists on the other, then the mission of integration will fail.”

She said too many pupils were being taught British values such as tolerance and democracy in a “piecemeal” fashion, with wall displays and assemblies. Instead they should be taught as part of a strong academic curriculum that would help pupils identify “fake news and siren voices”.

In a long and detailed speech, the chief inspector said the problems were confined to a small number of state schools, as well as some independent schools and unregistered provision.

She denied that Ofsted was biased against faith schools and said Muslim state schools were almost three times as likely to be judged outstanding by Ofsted than the national average, and Jewish and Christian state schools were more likely to be good or outstanding than their secular counterparts.

She also flagged up the dangers of the far right in response to a growing disenchantment with the status quo. “That disenchantment can so easily be exploited by extremists, who promise a better tomorrow by scapegoating and blaming minorities today. This is why it is right that the Prevent duty also focuses on tackling the growth of the far right.”

Responding to the speech, the Muslim Council of Britain expressed concern about a “top-down, mono-nationalist and establishment British values approach” which put the “moral onus on ethnic minorities for the supposed failures of integration”.

The MCB called on Spielman to tackle Islamophobia in schools with the same sort of gusto as she advocated British values and added: “The hijab is a religious right, and just as no one should be obligated to wear, nor must people alienate and vilify those who choose to adopt this practice.”

Mary Bousted, the National Education Union joint general secretary, accused Ofsted of being out of touch with schools on the issues of values. “The speech does nothing to help schools develop a culturally inclusive curriculum.

“Ofsted seem oblivious to the levels of racism faced by BME children and teenagers, and faced by BME professionals in education. Schools work tirelessly to support children to develop positive values – to both think for themselves and act for others. Ofsted should be supporting this work instead of making it harder.”

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