Council for Higher Education Accreditation
Logo of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation
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| Abbreviation | CHEA |
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President
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Judith S. Eaton |
| Website | CHEA.org |
The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a United States organization of degree-granting colleges and universities. It identifies its purpose as providing national advocacy for self-regulation of academic quality through accreditation in order to certify the quality of higher education accrediting organizations, including regional, faith-based, private, career, and programmatic accrediting organizations.
The organization has approximately 3,000 academic institutions as members, and currently recognizes approximately 60 accrediting organizations. CHEA is based in Washington, DC. CHEA is a member of The International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE)
Established in 1996, CHEA is the successor to several earlier national nongovernmental associations formed to coordinate the U.S. accreditation process for higher education. In 1974, the Federation of Regional Accrediting Commissions of Higher Education (FRACHE; an association of regional accreditors) and the National Commission on Accrediting (an association of specialized and national accreditation agencies) had merged to form the Council on Postsecondary Accreditation (COPA), which had the purpose of ensuring the quality of accreditation.
In 1993, COPA was dissolved because of tensions among the different types of accreditation agencies that formed its membership—ultimately the result of the increasing problems for higher education in the 1980s and 1990s. Problems with tuition increases, scandals, and doubts about the value of postsecondary higher education plagued all parts of the higher education sector.
In particular, Congressional investigations of soaring student loan defaults and student aid abuses were highly critical of the laxity of accreditation and accreditation processes.
Consequently, the 1992 amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965 included Program Integrity provisions designed to strengthen the gatekeeping triad for student loan guarantees and financial aid (i.e., state licensing bodies, accreditation associations, and Federal government). The higher education community viewed with alarm the establishment of State Postsecondary Review Entities (SPREs), which were given accrediting powers under special conditions. "When campus lobbyists heard about the legislation and realized that non-governmental accreditation was being replaced by a federal-state agency evaluation of institutions, including assessments of academic quality never before carried out by government, they 'went apoplectic', as one observer put it."
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