ED Should Revive NACIQI's Accreditor Dashboards

The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) has a pretty big job. As a federally appointed committee that reviews and recommends accrediting agencies for recognition by the Department of Education (ED), its advice can lead to accreditors gaining or losing the power to determine which colleges maintain a standard of quality that gives them access to taxpayer funded federal financial aid dollars. Despite the huge implications for NACIQI's decisions, data has not been an integral element of NACIQI's job for many years, due in part to the death of a key source of data: the accreditor dashboards.

The dashboards were created as part of a NACIQI pilot to incorporate questions about student outcomes into their agency reviews in 2015. Prior to 2015, NACIQI hardly used numerical data in their agency review, if at all. As a part of the project, the Department produced and provided data dashboards for NACIQI using College Scorecard data, which reflects individual college outcomes. This made it so that the dashboards showed an accrediting agency's profile: how many colleges they oversee, the percentage of students who take out federal student loans at those colleges, and how many colleges fall into certain brackets of student graduation rates, among other things. These dashboards reflected this information for all of the agency's Title IV institutions under their portfolio.

It sounds like a no-brainer: the entity tasked with helping the department ensure accreditors are doing their job should definitely use data to inform whether they recommend ED give them a stamp of approval. After all, ED recognition of accreditation gives an accrediting agency the power to determine whether a college can access students' federal financial aid. Instead, NACIQI has traditionally used narratives written by the accreditor and an ED review team to aid in their review. It wasn't until 2017 that NACIQI started using cold, hard data in an easy to digest format to help make their decisions regarding accreditor recognition.

Despite that progress, former Education Secretary Betsy Devos and the Trump Administration's ED thought differently about the use of data and took actions to make it more difficult for NACIQI to use data in their decision making not long after the implementation of the dashboards. At the same time, the terms of several student advocates on NACIQI ended, which left nobody to advocate for the dashboards to stay, even once they were a fully adopted part of the NACIQI recognition process.

Since then, the accreditor dashboards have fallen apart and have not been updated since 2018. That's nearly three years of data that have not been collected or analyzed and three years without solid data to hold accreditors accountable to. That means that NACIQI has had to go back to its old ways of reviewing agencies for approval: only reading qualitative, narrative self-assessments written by the agencies themselves without additional numerical data on their colleges' student outcomes to aid in their review.

The accreditor dashboards were a positive advancement for NACIQI-- they pushed both accreditors and NACIQI to look at how students were faring at the colleges approved by the agencies. But without them, NACIQI is partially blind to whether accreditors are doing their job as gatekeepers to taxpayer dollars in the form of student federal financial aid. This is especially concerning coming out of the pandemic, where students are struggling and for-profit enrollment and predatory practices are on the rise. It is that much more important that NACIQI have access to the data in the accreditor dashboards to aid in their decisions about an accrediting agency.

The reinstatement of the accreditor dashboards would be a positive change for NACIQI, the accreditation process, and ultimately for students. At the most recent NACIQI meeting in Winter 2021, the committee passed a motion to request that ED restore the dashboards, but so far there has been no public indication that ED will complete NACIQI's request to revive the dashboards, either for the next NACIQI meeting this summer or at all. This could leave NACIQI to continue to rely on accreditor narratives and make recommendations to ED without using data.

The Department of Education should follow through with NACIQI's request to reinstate the accreditor dashboards as soon as possible, and with some changes. The revived dashboards should include program level data, which could identify problems at particular types of programs that might not show up at the institution level. This is possible now that the College Scorecard, which is used to populate the dashboards, has program level data. The dashboards should also disaggregate data by demographics important to equity in higher education, such as socioeconomic status, first-generation status, and race. While the state of these outcomes is not a requirement for an accreditor to meet federal requirements, it is an important piece in the pursuit of higher quality postsecondary education, another one of NACIQI and the accreditation system's goals.

NACIQI plays a huge role as the entity that recommends an agency for recognition to ED, and in turn, virtually granting an accreditor the power to give colleges a stamp of approval and access to federal aid dollars. Data should, without a doubt, play a role in NACIQI's decision making. The Department of Ed should follow through with NACIQI's request to reinstate the accreditor dashboards to ensure that the accreditation process is one that is data-driven, transparent, and committed to quality and accountability.

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