Recent state legislative developments have brought accreditation to the forefront of public higher education conversations. Some accreditation critics state that accreditors have too much influence in higher education suggesting that their efforts may affect institutional autonomy and that they are allegedly structured as legalized monopolies…

Recent Florida legislation (SPB 7044) should be viewed with much concern and with skepticism as to the intent of the bill and its unintended consequences. The bill requires state colleges and universities to seek reaffirmation from different accrediting organizations at the end of each review cycle. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation…

The COVID-19 pandemic has dominated news, lives, daily conditions of families, economic social infrastructures, political upheavals, and international relations and has disjointed all norms associated with higher education. Universities of all sizes, demographics, and varying cultural identities or Carnegie classification scramble every day to…

Academic freedom and institutional autonomy are among the fundamental values of higher education. In Europe, they underpin the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), which was established in 1999, a decade after the launch of the profound changes in central and eastern Europe and slightly over two decades after the adoption of the Magna Charta…

Beyond the opportunity of crisis, the climate is favorable for major change in quality review. This report presents five specific steps that can lead to reinventing review of quality in higher education, a post-COVID redesign of accreditation and quality assurance that, if effective, will establish a foundation for the next era of these important…

COVID-19 has been powerful as a driver of the expanded reliance on distance learning and the concern about financial viability. Race has been the primary driver of greater attention to equity. Three issues -- large-scale distance learning, financial fragility and race and equity -- are driving the immediate future of accreditation, perhaps leading…

This report presents findings from a 2018 survey, CHEA Survey of Accrediting Organizations, administered by NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC), an independent research organization, on behalf of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). The purpose was to gather insights from accrediting organizations about their recent…

In the past few years, growing concerns about the rising costs of university education and soaring levels of indebtedness among graduates have led to strong student protests in places as diverse as Berkeley, Bogota, Johannesburg, Juba, Khartoum, Lilongwe, London, Madrid, Montreal, Santiago and Seoul (Salmi, 2017). As a result, several governments…

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a national, nongovernmental membership organization of degree-granting colleges and universities, the only organization with the sole purpose of providing national coordination of accreditation of higher education institutions and programs. CHEA serves as an advocate, national authority and…

Corruption in its many forms is a great threat to the integrity of education and research, not least because it undermines the trust placed in the educational process, devalues academic qualifications and forces the outcomes of research to be questioned. All stakeholders interested in quality and standards carry tacit responsibility for…

This is the executive summary for the report, "Policies and Actions of Accreditation and Quality Assurance Bodies to Counter Corruption in Higher Education." Corruption in its many forms is a great threat to the integrity of education and research, not least because it undermines the trust placed in the educational process, devalues…

The world of higher education has been changing rapidly over the last 30 years with the move to mass education due to the needs of the knowledge economy for an appropriately skilled labour force and driven by continuous advances in technology. The purpose of this publication is to provide an overview of how quality assurance (QA) bodies are…

This survey and its findings provide a comprehensive look at U.S. recognized institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations and what they report about how they address the challenge of innovation with quality in higher education. Conducted for the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) by NORC at the University of Chicago in…

The European Union (EU) has an ambitious plan to create transnational "European Universities" out of networks of European higher education institutions. The initiative is not a new idea, but has been given fresh and significant impetus in the past year due to fears that UK withdrawal -- or "Brexit" -- and rising populism on the…

Academic corruption in its different forms is not a new phenomenon. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) has been active in addressing this area for a number of years. In cooperation with UNESCO, it issued an "Advisory Statement on Discouraging Degree Mills" (see ED603204). The document was prepared for the 2009 UNESCO…