HE accreditation reforms will need to put students first

A financial crisis has been threatening Chile’s higher education system which comprises 126 institutions that were actively enrolling in 2024, including 55 universities, 31 professional institutes and 40 technical training centres.

Some 1,277,340 students were enrolled in undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate programmes in 2024, a year which saw an increase in the risk profile of 25 to 28 institutions, affecting around 59,069 students.

These students are generally distributed in the Austral, SEK, Aysén, Antofagasta, Magallanes and De la Frontera universities, organisations in which financial management problems or severe economic crises have been detected which have led them to put forward recovery plans or even to be assigned provisional administrators.

Students at universities are more subject to financial risk than those in other forms of higher education, such as professional institutes or technical training centres. When we look closer at the type of university classified as being at high financial risk, we see that 4,767 students belong to state universities, 17,415 to the G9 Network (a consortium of leading Chilean universities that are not directly controlled by the government) and 21,392 to other private institutions.

Mandatory quality assurance

Law 21.091, enacted five years ago, updated the regulations on higher education. It made accreditation of internal quality assurance processes mandatory, which theoretically should be expressed in an improvement in the management quality of higher education institutions.

The information outlined above raises several questions: What has been the real impact of the accreditation process of institutions and undergraduate and graduate programmes on the central focus of the system’s work: its students?

The long-standing accreditation processes in Chile have gone through changes over the years, but a common factor has been a focus on continuous quality improvement. However, this ideal has only been achieved on some occasions since the process was often an activity that the state carried out formally and bureaucratically and institutions carried out ritualistically.

Law 21.091 attempts to remedy these problems, focusing on the student and strengthening a culture of self-regulation that includes all institutional actors.

Many people believe that if a university, professional institute or technical training centre has achieved accreditation, this is a guarantee of quality. However, the institutional and career accreditation process may still need to respond to new challenges.

Before addressing this issue and contextualising it, it should be noted that Chile does not currently have a strategic development policy when it comes to higher education that would outline a path to follow to successfully address the numerous social, economic and cultural challenges it will face in the coming decades.

What does the state expect from its higher education system?

The number of people entering the higher education system is slowly decreasing, the student profile is changing and there is a growing devaluation of professional degrees. Unemployment and changes in work patterns bring a new urgency and a much greater emphasis on lifelong learning and upgrading qualifications.

One relevant aspect of all this is the financial value of accreditation for institutions, and for that we need an estimate of the costs that an average university incurs in direct and indirect expenses in the process.

Universities must renew their accreditation periodically, in three to seven years depending on their category (basic, advanced and excellent). In addition, accreditation committees comprise academic peers from other institutions, which means that the entity seeking accreditation must effectively convince its competitors to include them in the highest categories and in doing so strengthen its reputational value in the market.

On the other hand, accreditation processes are often more oriented towards conformity with the standard established by the regulatory body than towards promoting the purposes established in the respective missions of the different institutions, thus inhibiting innovation and, therefore, the organisation’s future growth.

Return on investment

By way of justification, one could argue that beyond the difficulties enunciated above, accreditation constitutes an effective control of academic quality and ensures that students attending accredited institutions obtain good educational outcomes. We can explore this question by analysing the return on investment (ROI) of universities, professional institutes and technical training centres.

There are several publications on the subject dating back more than 10 years. Without information, young people have no choice but to enrol in institutions that ‘look’ sound, but in the education market what ‘looks’ good can very different from what ‘is’ good.

The ROI metric should compare the increase in lifetime earnings associated with a degree with the costs of obtaining that degree, including tuition, time out of the workforce and the risk of dropping out. If the lifetime earnings gains outweigh these costs, that credential has a positive ROI and generally leaves students better off financially. If the costs outweigh the benefits, the credential has an unfavourable ROI, and students are generally worse off if they have enrolled.

For the sake of transparency, it would be very valuable to have current studies that can identify whether those undergraduate or graduate programmes with negative ROIs are accredited or not. If they are, that would mean that accreditation does not protect students from low-quality programmes in contravention of the supposed focus on the student.

International experience shows that accrediting agencies are more comfortable pressuring institutions to improve than using expeditious measures to sift low-quality actors out of the higher education industry. Therefore, if this is the case, they could sanction low-quality institutions and give deadlines to improve their results or help them resolve their problems.

Students don’t want to waste their time on educational programmes that will probably not bring them enough benefits to cover their costs, and in many instances, leave them in debt for an extended period.

Professionalisation of management

Another key issue is how the current accreditation process effectively measures the actual level of student learning in a particular subject. The focus of the teaching-learning process must be oriented to the degree of discipline-focused learning of students and to the acquisition of competencies that allow them to perform in challenging environments and to innovate in their professional work.

However, uncertainty remains among higher education professionals about assessing student learning for accreditation purposes, including how to link the standards and other requirements of accreditation standards to the operational work of their university.

The financial crisis mentioned at the beginning of this article shows that, in general, there should be a progressive move towards greater professionalisation of the management structure in charge of the strategic and financial management of higher education institutions.

Higher education institutions should probably autonomously review some aspects of their governance so that it is not the Peter principle that defines institutional management (ie, the idea that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”).

Recently, the Chilean agency overseeing higher education pointed out that “the sector receives many resources, but we are not so clear that, in some cases, strategic management and expenditure management have the necessary level of sophistication to manage the greater resources that universities are receiving professionally”.

The same authority added: “In several cases, we have found administrations that are not very neat, not very professional, and given the volume of public resources, given the public faith involved and given the need to respond to the formative processes of students and the commitments to society, we must move towards an urgent solution in this regard.”

Along the same lines, the growing politicisation of teaching staff is also responsible for deficiencies in the professional management and strategic leadership of institutions since it affects three elements that harmonise and strengthen academic life: freedom, reason and truth.

Serving students better

Many higher education institutions at financial risk have institutional accreditation results that place them between the categories of ‘advanced’ and ‘excellent’, which indicates that the current accreditation processes are not as effective as the affected students and the taxpayers would expect and deserve.

This shows that the accreditation processes have problems identifying institutional difficulties in these areas, and there is also no articulation in the system so that its members can work together to resolve them.

It seems to be the right time to rethink accreditation and introduce aspects that have not been considered so far, such as studies that would shed light on the reality of the accreditation system. We should always think in favour of students and emphasise the strengthening of the regulatory body’s institutional effectiveness.

The solutions to the problem of the Chilean educational system require a holistic and systemic vision. Only a strategy along these lines can ensure the efficient use of public resources. The educational system must identify, tackle and remedy students’ problems while rewarding effort and dedication.

Carlos Olivares is a higher education consultant based in Chile. E-mail: colivares66@gmail.com

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.