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In an update to the story of the American Council on Education’s “concerns” about the new federal definition of an academic credit, the group is now asking Congress to delay enacting regulations.
According to a piece in Inside Higher Ed:
A coalition of higher education groups on Thursday asked Congressional leaders to push for a one-year delay in two Education Department regulations that are scheduled to take effect in July. The groups, organized as usual by the American Council on Education, urged Representative Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who heads the House of Representatives postsecondary education subcommittee, to either encourage or force the Education Department to delay the implementation date of rules that would establish a federal definition of “credit hour”…. The rules… “will have little or no effect in curbing fraud and abuse, but they could do enormous damage to the quality and diversity of postsecondary academic offerings,” the groups wrote. Education Department officials have ignored previous requests from the higher education associations to change or rescind the rules, the groups said. And with time running out, neither state officials nor campus administrators have guidance about how to implement the new rules, making for an impossible situation, the associations suggest.
The federal government defined credit hour for the first time because credit hours are used to determine federal financial aid.
It’s true that the new designation—under which college credits are defined as “measuring the amount of work consisting of one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and at least two hours of student work outside the classroom over a set period of time”—don’t really do anything to measure effort or learning, but colleges have had plenty of time to come up with a better way to measure student progress. Most of them are not interested in making those kinds of reforms.
The fact that the Education Department has ignored previous requests from ACE to change the definition of credit hours suggests that it doesn’t find ACE objections to be all that valid.
No word yet from Virginia Foxx, not exactly known as a innovative thinker on higher education matters, on what she plans to do about this.
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Richard Claycombe on July 18, 2011 5:06 PM:
Credit Definition and Low Contact Schools
A variety organizations have written repeatedly over the last year about the Dept. of Education�s new regulations requiring schools to define their credit hour. The concern here seems to be about the credibility of online and/or for-profit schools and the student aid dollars that they attract. But complaints about the regulations come from the broad range of college institutions. Why do traditional colleges object? One might think they would welcome less competition. They say the regulations will add to their administration costs, but I think the concern is about the credit definition itself. The Carnegie definition which is thought of as the standard is not so standard among many of our most elite schools and many colleges that don�t meet that standard don�t want to be held accountable. According to Carnegie, students are supposed to have one hour of class for each credit. Even if an hour only has 50 minutes to allow for passing time between classes, many schools haven�t met this standard for decades.
This summer I decided that I would spend some time to see how much contact time our highest ranked schools have with their students. I took the US News top 125 liberal arts schools and visited all their webs sites to survey their schedule of classes and graduation requirements. Look for tables at(http://user.pa.net/~kjclay/pages/Contact-Time.htm) that group the schools according to how much they seem to require of their students and I give a verbal summary in what follows. I recognize that contact time guarantees nothing about the quality of a course, but I would also suggest that schools that economize on teaching time have a high standard to meet for work outside of class. It is widely recognized that NSSE data show that students aren�t even close to the work outside of class that the Carnegie standard requires and Arum and Roksa have data that shows even less study. Given this, it is hard to believe that schools that have less contact time demand work outside of class to make up for the reduced class time. They put the burden of proof on themselves. They need to show that their students study more outside of class than similarly ranked schools with more contact time. I doubt that they can. It seems more likely that these schools want their faculty to do more research and their students to have an easier path through school.
So how little do the low contact schools require of their students? There are 26 schools ranked from 3 to 93 that require 150 minutes a week of class for most of their courses and only 32 courses to graduate. Generally labs don�t get extra credit and often languages require more class time. Sometimes there are a few classes that meet longer. I wonder why that is? These faculty must feel they can�t teach their course with less time. What does that say about all the other courses? My view is that we can make a course as tough as we see fit. The low contact faculty argue that their courses are tough; that the students just do more independent work outside of class. But the data I�ve mentioned above say there�s not much going on outside of class. It seems to me that these schools are giving 4 credits for 3 credits courses. Faculty don�t have to teach or grade as much and students don�t have to work as much. That�s good for graduation rates, school ratings and bottom lines.
There are 39 schools that look good as far as contact hours go, ranked from 8 to 122. I wonder where the conviction comes from to resist the rewards that the low contact schools enjoy. This group certainly includes some highly ranked schools. Carleton (ranked 8th) for example requires 210 credits, which seems extraordinary except that they give 6 credits for most courses. With about 4.5 courses a semester students graduate in four years. Those 6 credit courses meet 200 or 210 minutes per week. Washington and Lee (14) still has the traditio