The accreditation process and the federal role in shaping it are clearly of critical importance for ensuring all students have access to quality postsecondary options. And yet, due to the complexity of the relationship among the federal government, accreditors, and institutions, and the opacity of the accreditation process itself, there is little…

Typically, efforts made by colleges and universities to provide more accountability are linked to having institutions provide more information and make their processes more transparent to their various stakeholders. One way in which public institutions can reasonably be held accountable is to rely to a large extent on the relationship they have…

The 2011 edition of "Minnesota Measures: Report on Higher Education Performance" reflects a new approach to reporting on the effectiveness of postsecondary education within the state. The report covers key measures of postsecondary effectiveness as in the previous three editions of the report but is grounded in the students' experience…

This project studied four career college and school campuses in Texas that had higher than average graduation rates and lower than average student loan default rates to determine what they did to achieve these positive outcomes. The visits to the campuses found that a conscious, concerted effort to integrate students into the academic and social…

Whereas many prior studies evaluated the association between borrower or institutional characteristics and default behavior, the general finding of most researchers today is that college success plays a bigger role in predicting who will default than either the background of the borrower or the type of institution attended. All else being equal,…