Talk:Council for Higher Education Accreditation

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Mr. Golin,

I appreciate your interest in accuracy, but part of the Wikipedia project is to correct inaccuracies...not just wholesale delete material.

Given your objections, I have tried to more clearly clarify that the accrediation is not CHEA accreditation, but is rather CHEA recognized accrediation. I've also tried to more carefully word other items that may be of special concern to a CHEA board member.

But I submit that the extended discussion of accreditation and CHEA as a "self appointed, self policing" mechanism of colleges, universities and accreditors should be more clearly pointed out.

If you feel a need to correct and clarify, please do so. But wholesale deletion of materialis inappropriate...especially, in my opinion, because you are a CHEA board member and it could give the appearance that there are points being raised that you don't want to see discussed.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.143.31.236 (talk • contribs)

Dear Wikipedia contributor,

CHEA is not self-appointed; the USDE is, by statute, to identify an authoritative agency to participate in oversight of the U.S. accrediting system. It is CHEA that USDE identifies this way.

I do not mean to have given offense-- it is not my intention to distress you. However, so much of what you wrote was incorrect that the obligation to correct your submission should be yours.

I do not think it is reasonable to name only two members of the CHEA board. Either the chair alone, or the entire board would be better. But also, none of the CHEA administration is named, and this is curious.

GG—Preceding unsigned comment added by G-gollin (talk • contribs) 21:41, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

I removed 70.143.31.236's rambling diatribe. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Breaklaugh99 (talk • contribs) 1 July 2007

What evidence is there that CHEA Board members are not self-appointing? All appointments arise from the membership, but it is unclear if appointments to the Board are "Board-only" (i.e., self-appointment). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board-only

It would be better to discuss existing by-laws for Board appointments, and provide links rather than to simply say CHEA is or is not (this or that). Gsmcghee (talk) 21:55, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Umm... Let's consider this particular conversation to be closed. This started nearly 3 years ago over what appears to have been an allegation that CHEA is the self-appointed overseer of the U.S. accreditation process. The article says nothing about how board members are appointed -- and that's not a detail that would normally be found in an encyclopedia article. There's not much to discuss here... --Orlady (talk) 23:28, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Possible Inaccuracies and Improvements

"CHEA counts approximately 3,000 academic institutions as members and currently recognizes 60 accrediting organizations.[1]"

There is no documentation for this membership number, nor is there a active member roster at the CHEA website. It is generally not a good idea to rely on an organization for undocumented information about itself, since that means relying on only one source, which may be biased.

According to CHEA's website, it clearly states that it "recognizes 59 institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations," so this should be corrected in the article.

CHEA's "purposes include providing national advocacy for self-regulation of academic quality through accreditation and providing scrutiny and certification of the quality of higher education accrediting organizations, including regional, faith-based, private career, and programmatic accrediting organizations.[1]"

That CHEA is a higher education advocacy and lobbying group for accreditors is clearly seen in their activities, for example, in their outspoken opposition to the accreditation reforms discussed by Spellings Commission.

There is, however, no evidence or independent verification for the statement in bolded text; that is, there are no annual assessment reports, no available procedures showing organizational "scrutiny" regarding "quality," or public notices of recognized accreditors being dropped by CHEA. CHEA, for example, lacks explicit complaint procedures against its members, lacks measureable quality standards, and apparently does not respond to complaints. Likewise, there is no detail available on CHEA's "certification" process. It therefore cannot be presented as fact, as it is in this article, that any "scrutiny" of accreditor "quality" actually takes place, either initially or annually, or every decade.

CHEA recognition of accreditors needs to be clearly distinguished from recognition by the US Secretary of Education because readers unfamiliar with the gatekeeping triad in US higher education may be mistakenly lead to believe that CHEA recognition plays a role in the disbursement of Title IV (HEA) student financial aid and loan guarantees. CHEA recognition has no such legal significance.

This is another reason that it may be misleading to talk about CHEA "providing scrutiny" of the "quality" of accreditors: this is the statutory duty of NACIQI, an independent commission of the US Department of Education, whose job it is (when it is convened) to inform the Secretary of Education of its findings. CHEA has no such statutory basis.

The History section lacks depth, since the back-story on the collapse of COPA in the aftermath of the 1992 amendments to the Higher Education Act (HEA), and the difficulties re-starting a national advocacy group for the accreditors, is much more colorful than what is here. Sources: Bloland, Parsons, etc.

Improvements to this article should also provide context for why US accreditors feel they need a national lobbying and advocacy group to defend their shared interests, and to explain what those interests are. The worst case scenario, one which CHEA is apparently working against, would be a European-style ministry-based bureau-type reform of higher education accreditation in the US. Article revisions should describe what benefits and privileges would be lost in such a transition, both for colleges and institutions, as well as for accreditors.Gsmcghee (talk) 21:24, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Regarding the first two paragraphs of Gsmcghee's comment: The article clearly attributes the membership number to CHEA (the cited statement starts "CHEA counts...") and it cites a source (this CHEA fact sheet).

The third paragraph lists a correction to be made to the article (specifically, changing 60 to 59). I haven't taken the time to figure out where on the CHEA website this new value appears. Since 59 is only slightly different from 60 and the article is sourced in conformance with WP:V, I'm not real concerned about the discrepancy. The info in the article could be changed if a proper source is cited.

The fourth paragraph quotes the statement of purposes in the article lead. The statement in the lead comes from that same source as the numbers of members; I edited the article lead section to make it clearer that this is CHEA's own statement.

Paragraphs 5 through 8 are mostly criticisms of the statement of purpose, including some views about the presumed unacknowledged motivations, purported actual activities, and effectiveness of the organization, as well as its relationship with the U.S. Department of Education. Please be advised that Wikipedia talk pages, such as this one, should not be used to discuss the subject matter of the article -- thus, this is not an appropriate place to engage in arguments about CHEA. It would be appropriate for the article to include information about criticisms that have been lodged against CHEA, as long as that content is based on descriptions of that criticism that have been published in reliable sources that are cited in the article.

Paragraph 9 suggests that the History section needs to be expanded. Expansion would be appropriate (there's a reason why this article is tagged as a stub), with full source citations and care to avoid expressing non-neutral points of view regarding that history.

Finally, the content suggested in the last paragraph also may be appropriate to add, but only if it can be added as a fully sourced description based on content published by third-party reliable sources. --Orlady (talk) 23:52, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for the valuable suggestions, which I will try to implement. Please let me know how I am doing. Thanks again. Gsmcghee (talk) 03:53, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Sourcing, encyclopedic style, neutral point of view, etc.

A newly registered user who seems to have some grievances against CHEA and U.S. accreditation of higher education has been actively engaged in revising the article (edit warring) to attack CHEA and Wikipedia for a number of perceived sins. I have numerous concerns about this user's edits. My concerns start with the lead sentence, which was revised to eliminate that straightforward and well-sourced information that "the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a United States organization of degree-granting colleges and universities" (a statement of the basic nature of the organization, consistent with Wikipedia guidance on the lead section) and replaced it with the less informative "The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a private organization located in the United States that maintains professional connections with degree-granting colleges and universities", which denies the fact that it is an organization of universities and may be intended to imply a dark conspiracy. --Orlady (talk) 17:58, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

CHEA is a reliable source for basic information about itself. There is ample documentation by other authorities regarding federal government recognition of the role of CHEA in U.S. education accreditation. For example:

1. http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/schray.pdf
2. http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ous/international/usnei/us/edlite-accreditation.html

I find that some content recently added to this article comes from (indeed was copied verbatim from) reliable sources (e.g., http://www2.ed.gov/admins/finaid/accred/accreditation_pg2.html ), but statements like "The United States has no federal Ministry of Education or other centralized authority exercising single national control over postsecondary educational institutions in this country" should not be construed as indicating that CHEA is dishonest in describing itself as having a role in federally recognized accreditation. --Orlady (talk) 19:04, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

The new user's edits to the article appear to be aimed largely at communicating a message about higher education accreditation in the United States. I didn't find a link to that article in this article, so I added a link near the beginning of the "History" section. That article describes the voluntary nature of the U.S. accreditation process and the limited interaction between the federal government and that activity. I believe that these are topics about which the new user wants to broadcast a message. Regardless of their viewpoints on CHEA, I hope that everyone who edits this article will try to abide by Wikipedia's policies on neutral point of view, verifiability of content, and no original research. Wikipedia is not a venue for promoting your opinions or attempting to right great wrongs. --Orlady (talk) 13:50, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

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Not neutral

This entire article is written in a very bizarre way. From someone who has never heard of CHEA and has no outside perspective of how accreditation works in the US and who oversees it, this article is written - very clearly, in my perspective - in a way that tries repeatedly to almost propogandize CHEA's legitimacy, in a way that truly legitimate organization Wiki pages are not written. I don't know what's going on in this article or on this talk page but this wiki page has me walking away less convinced that CHEA is a legitimate organization and more concerned that it is a private lobbying group of some sort. Additionally, many of the sources are either CHEA itself, or the international agency who serves to verify CHEA and its European counterpart. That doesn't seem very legitimate, and it makes it even more confusing that the entire viewpoint section is against "European-style" college systems. In fact, the view points page makes it even more clear that this is more of a lobbying or special-interest group than a legitimate "agency" for higher education. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.176.9.254 (talk) 13:51, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Seems to be balanced and ok, but needs to be modified

Agrees with the earlier writer in saying that some of claims needs to be verified, but at the same point of time, it is not reason enough to defame and say libellous things about the CHEA (Council for Higher Education Accreditation). They seem to have good presence all around. yes, the article needs to have more references and needs to be re written in a much more proper manner with subtler tone. (Themisislegal (talk) 09:24, 25 October 2023 (UTC))

Some clarifications on sources and sentences

I addressed some issues with an edit; they can be seen in the article. The book referenced by Harlan G. Bloland is used several times in citation. While I see no evidence thus far that he was ever directly involved in CHEA, it would be good to have more sources rather than one that is returned to repeatedly, especially one in which he was present during board meetings. Also, the reference to "helping the public" regarding understanding accreditation is a misleading, somewhat strange statement - how many of the public have been helped to understand accreditation? How does one determine this? - and the citation merely leads back to CHEA's website anyway. The same issue arises with the sentence on "European-style" education, which is a statement that is so vague, that it seems intentionally so, and again, is simply backed up with a link to the organization's website. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Genevieve de la Voie Moyenne (talk • contribs) 04:04, 8 December 2020 (UTC)