Larry Schall is starting his seventh year as president of the New England Commission of Higher Education, the accreditor that traces its roots to 1885 and calls itself the first quality assurance agency in the world. Before that he practiced law for almost a decade, spent 15 years as the chief operating officer of a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania and then 15 more as a university president in Atlanta, so he sat on the other side of the accreditation table for 30 years.
Larry and I go back a long way, and in this episode of The PR Bunker Podcast he explains how accreditation actually works, what a family should notice on a campus visit, and what's coming for colleges in New England and beyond.
A few takeaways from the conversation:
NECHE has a staff of 12 and several thousand volunteers who do the hard work. A school spends 18 months to two years on a self-study, then a team of five or six peers from similar institutions, including a finance chief, faculty and student services people, spends most of a week on campus checking the evidence. A commission of about 30 volunteers reviews the reports five or six times a year and decides whether the school stays accredited. Larry says outcomes matter more and more, from graduation rates to what graduates do afterward, and every school must make one third of a student's courses general education.
Most college students today aren't at a residential college, and plenty are working while they study. Larry's advice for campus visits is to ignore the weather and the tour guide and ask whether the people there care about you and your success. His oldest son struggled at a big public university for two years and told him nobody reached out when he stopped going to class. He took a year off, went back and did really well.
Compare NECHE's roster from 2000 with today and 70 institutions are gone. Some closed, some merged, and Connecticut's 12 community colleges became one institution with 12 campuses. Five small independent schools closed last year alone, because there are simply fewer high school graduates. Larry also points to new federal accreditation rules arriving November 1 that tell accreditors what to look at and what to ignore, which he sees as a real challenge for institutional independence.
Larry still loves the travel that comes with the job, from a law school in Charleston seeking accreditation to a week in Thailand this December, and he writes about it in his blog, NECHE on the Road, which just passed its hundredth entry. You can learn more about the commission at neche.org.
Listen to the full episode above.
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What does a college accreditor do?
An institutional accreditor like NECHE reviews a whole college or university against broad quality standards using peer review teams, then decides whether it stays accredited and where it needs to improve. Programmatic accreditors separately review specific programs like law, medicine or engineering.
Why have so many New England colleges disappeared since 2000?
According to Larry Schall, 70 institutions on NECHE's 2000 roster are no longer on it. Some closed, some merged into other schools, and some public colleges were consolidated, largely because fewer students are graduating high school in New England.
What should families look for on a college visit?
Larry suggests looking past the tour guide and the weather and asking whether the people on campus care about your success and will reach out if you start to struggle. That can be true at a residential college or a community college.
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