A necessary update to Brazil’s accreditation process

Approximately a month ago, Digital Innovation Consulting Group was hired by an international higher education institution to evaluate the institution's accreditation process. The scope of the consultancy would be to create a platform that would allow the integration of the institutional report and existing evidence with internationally recognized evaluation criteria. The institution will hire an American accreditation agency, such as the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), WASC Senior College & University Commission (WSCUC), New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE), among others, to carry out this accreditation. In this article, the development of this platform will not be discussed, since there is a NDA signed by both parties. Therefore, the objective of this article is to address two points that permeate all chapters of the accreditation documents of these agencies: faculty productivity and student outcomes. In due course I will write an article on faculty productivity, this article will focus only on student outcomes.?

I remember that, when I was leading educational institutions where I once worked, the entire institution had to ensure that existing institutional practices and policies were aligned with the Institutional Development Plan (PDI). We had to produce an institutional report highlighting these practices and policies, using the External Assessment Manual developed by the Ministry of Education, when institutional reaccreditation took place. In the last two re-accreditations I participated in (face-to-face re-accreditation and distance learning re-accreditation) the institution received the maximum Institutional Concept (CI = 5, on an increasing scale of excellence from 1 to 5). Although the Assessment Manuals produced by the Brazilian Ministry of Education have evolved a lot, they still do not include faculty productivity and student outcomes, like international documents. I believe it would be an excellent opportunity to include these points in an upcoming review of Brazilian assessment manuals. Currently, the manuals for accreditation and re-accreditation date from 2017.

But what does student outcomes mean? More broadly, I understand that we could categorize it in at least 4 different ways:

• Student learning outcomes. Perhaps this is the main success metric of the student's academic journey. As we have previously discussed in the article Innovative Academic Model – Student-Centered, the student-centered model is one of the paths that institutions can adopt to obtain better learning results. As already written in this article: This model “encourages students to discover their own paths in education, making them learn to learn, developing their own knowledge structures, rather than simply being subjected to a standard knowledge base and identical for all students”.
• Student engagement. This engagement can occur through institutional activities and practices that make the student experience memorable and transformative, inside and outside the classroom, as already presented in our articles on Student Journey and the concept of Student Experience (Student Journey – Student Experience (SX) – An introduction). These activities are multiple, and, as an example, institutions can adopt seminars, internships, subjects related to diversity and global knowledge, research, participation in projects and in foundation courses (courses that give students the opportunity to become familiar with life university, university courses and expectations regarding higher education), among others.
• Professional results. Definition of some metrics that measure the performance of graduates in the job market, such as: time taken to get a job after graduation, percentage of students working in their area of studying, average starting salary achieved by students, etc. The Gallup-Purdue index that measures some important outcomes of higher education — Great Jobs / Great Lives is an excellent example of how professional success is fundamental. This index was created by Purdue University, in partnership with Gallup and the Lumina Foundation.
• Retention and graduation rates. Very important indicators to measure the student's academic development and that provide higher education leaders with insights into student performance throughout the programs.

I believe that accreditation processes that incorporate student outcomes at their core, as presented above, are in line with a better-quality education and graduates who are better prepared for the job market and their lives. “Education does not transform the world. Education changes people. People transform the world", a famous phrase from Paulo Freire, a great Brazilian educator and philosopher.