How WASC Is Shaping the Future of Accreditation and Student Success:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 285 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Maria Toyoda

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast  – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

Intro

Drumm McNaughton:  My guest today is Maria Toyoda, President and CEO of WASC, Senior College and University Commission. Maria began her tenure at WASC in March 2025, just seven to eight months ago, and she brings strategy, expertise, business and political acumen developed over nearly three decades in higher ed as a scholar, as a professor and administrator.

Prior to joining WASC, she was Executive Vice President and Provost at Western New England University, where she led institutional strategy and financial sustainability efforts, oversaw accreditation, assessment, student success, and other key areas. Maria is one of the newest folks to join the accreditors as the leader, and she joins me to talk about the state of accreditation, about WASC, some of the innovative things they’re doing, and how it can affect institutions.

Maria, welcome to the program.

Maria Toyoda: Thanks, Drumm. Good to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s my pleasure to have you, and let me relate to you a belated congratulations for taking over WASC. You have big shoes to fill in the case of Jamie.

Maria Toyoda: I sure do. I sure do. But it’s been a really fantastic six or seven months and Jamie has been absolutely terrific in helping me get on board.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, there have been so many people from WASC that I have known over the years, all excellent, excellent folks. When I think about the accreditors, I think [00:01:30] of WASC as right up there in the cream de la cream.

Maria Toyoda: Thanks for saying that. It has nothing to do with you, right, Drumm? All the years you spent—

Drumm McNaughton: No, nothing to do with me. It’s really the staff that has been there, the leadership that’s been there.

Maria Toyoda: I agree. I think I work with the best staff in the business, so thanks for noting that.

Drumm McNaughton: Except for, no, I’m just kidding. So you’ve been at WASC six or seven months, when we chatted the other day, you gave me a little bit of your background and story. I found it fascinating. Please share with my listeners, our listeners, a little bit of your background.

Maria Toyoda: Oh sure. Well, there’s a boring version and then there’s somewhat more interesting—

more

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s get right to the fun stuff.

Maria Toyoda: In lots of ways I’m a pretty traditional academic, but I’ve spent some time, particularly in doing international education, spending some time in Japan and in very interested in things like public finance, international finance, which is where my scholarship was, but I think it’s the time I spent teaching, spending time with students, advising them. You know, interestingly, I found advising to be the real key to getting to know what students need. I would say that that time spent with students has been the most motivating thing now that I’m sitting in the accreditor seat.

But, you know, I work my way up the ranks administratively, like a lot of traditional academics do. [00:03:00] So, been a dean, I’ve been a provost. And I think the other thing that been helpful for this position is the time that I’ve spent in different kinds of institutions. I mean, they, in every sense, they’ve all been comprehensive universities, which I think are some of the toughest kinds of institutions to run. But in the other sense, they’ve been both elite universities, rising elite universities, and universities that might be considered opportunity and access institutions.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, it’s interesting, and when you said Japan, the first thing that came to my mind was Ohayo gozaimasu.

Maria Toyoda: Ohayo gozaimasu.

Drumm McNaughton: What came to mind was WASC is, and I can’t remember, it wasn’t under Jamie, who was the president before Jamie?

Maria Toyoda: Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen Petrisko.

Drumm McNaughton: Mary Ellen, she and Ralph really started the focus on, well, not the focus, but a partial focus on international accreditation. And that is a big piece of WASC, wASC, I believe, was the first one to start that. And then, you know, you’ve got a lot of folks, a lot of other creditors have followed suite.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, I don’t know the history of that very well, and I wouldn’t say that international institutions makes up a hugely significant portion of our membership, but they are important for us, as members. And what I like about the way in which we have over [00:04:30] time evolved our standards and have thought about how we apply our standards, is that there’s a recognition that institutions are very different. Right? There are a variety of institutions and if you take that idea and extend it even further to global institutions, to institutions in other countries, you’ll see that that ability to take our standards and extend them to different circumstances and contexts is really what matters. And I think that’s what makes it possible for us to go out to institutions around the world, but also domestically and internationally to institutions that are delivering instruction and education in different ways, their different modes of instruction. So, this is a really exciting time, Drumm, in terms of where we’re going with education.

I know a lot of people see and hear the noise out there about what’s going on. But really in some ways it couldn’t be a more exciting time when you think about it. And I don’t wanna just harp on the technology ’cause technology should be viewed as a tool. But it’s a tool that can certainly change the way we deliver instruction and education. But it’s also acceptance, I think, acceptance of different modes of education, modalities of delivering instruction that now is a wonderful time to be looking at. You know, [00:06:00] anything from competency based, to apprenticeships, and today in fact, we’re, we’re gonna be doing a joint webinar with Middle States and SACS on how technology is going toassist and help institutions adapt to new realities on the transfer front.

So, yeah, but, you know, creditors should look to be flexible about these sorts of things and to develop the capacity to assess those kinds of things.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, when I look at accreditors, I look at the spectrum. One of them is compliance. You know, that’s on one side. You’ve got these certain standards you’ve gotta make. And then on the other side you’ve got innovation, and you’ve got accreditors, such as yourselves, such as NECHE, such as the Northwest Commission, who are very much in the innovation, and HLC is moving in that direction as well. It’s not that it’s all about innovation, there’s baseline standards that institutions must meet. But it’s like how are you meeting those? What are the innovative ways? And how are you in that continuous improvement cycle?

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, you’re absolutely right, Drumm. You know, there’s a lot of emphasis put on compliance and no doubt there are federal regulations and state regulations that we all have to comply with and often accreditors are the conduit for those regulations. But we really do see ourselves, you know, innovation, yes, improvement, yes. I mean, there are [00:07:30] ways that you can innovate where you’re not necessarily adopting the latest greatest modality, but that you’re constantly improving what you do in terms of outcomes. Getting to know your students better. It’s getting to know their needs better. It’s understanding the evolving audience that we’re teaching to, you know. More and more adult learners with very different needs are entering higher education. That ought to be something we celebrate. But it’s also something we need to support.

I’m also glad that you highlight innovation because that’s been kind of I think a myth about accreditors is that we suppress or somehow block innovation, and really it couldn’t be less untrue. I think that for institutions, they do see us as regulators sometimes, and there’s no helping the fact that we do have to, you know, that there are compliance issues. But I’ll say that my review of our standards and where they emanate from,a lot of the things that might be considered compliance issues are really about regulations, you know, statewide regulations

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, and we’ll get into the triad a little bit later in the podcast, but the compliance piece of it, comes from the Higher Education Act in, I believe it was 1965, 68, somewhere back in there, which establishing the triad.One thing about the outcomes base, ’cause you mentioned it’s about [00:09:00] outcomes and then you, in the next breath, you mentioned students. I had the opportunity to do a little bit of work overseas and the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi just changed their accreditation standards to pretty much reflect everything being outcomes rather than process oriented. And I was thinking, “wow, this is, this is pretty innovative”.

Maria Toyoda: Well, I would think that one of the best ways of thinking about what the function of education should be, what are our students learning, what are they endowed with when they, complete your program of study ?I think accreditation used to be a lot about inputs. You know? Belle Wheelan, the outgoing, president from SACSCOC used to say, “you think we’re still counting library books?”

Drumm McNaughton: I remember her saying that.

Maria Toyoda: She said that a lot. No, we, we don’t.Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some inputs that aren’t important. They certainly are important, and they go a lot into when we talk about resourcing and integrity. That’s a starting point. But what we care about in terms of evidence is what are your students coming out with? So there’s some very basic things. Right?

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, it’s so critical, it’s outcomes. But unless you’re also looking at the process, and this is one of the reasons I like working with WASC institutions, you’re looking at outcomes, and it’s not just, [00:10:30] you know, programmatic assessment, programmatic review, there’s other outcomes that are required as well. But you also look at the process, because if the process is broken the outcomes will not be optimized to where they need to be.

Maria Toyoda: That’s right. And sometimes the data that is often produced as a form of evidence is, you know, you need the context to understand that data. And that context comes from understanding the process.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. One of the things that drives my wife crazy about me is I see the big picture and I know the details at the same point. And it’s an unusual skillset, but it’s really helpful with accreditation work is you can understand, you know, if you take a look at a process, there’s multiple different ways that that process can go, “are you going the right way?” And keeping in mind it’s all about the student. It’s about you’re there to help the student both, you know, graduate, better themselves economically over a lifetime, but also too, it’s a transformation process that, you know, and I’m thinking undergraduates, graduate students, a little bit different than that, you’re going back for specific skills, but undergraduate people seem to forget about that transformational process that is so critical from the time you’re 18 to 24.

Maria Toyoda: I agree. I mean, there’s a, a real [00:12:00] apples to oranges issue when you’re talking about, you know, your traditional aged 17 or 18-year-old going into a four year traditional program versus say an adult learner or somebody coming back to get a graduate degree or somebody who’s stopped out and, and come back. There’s a lot of life that happens in between.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Really.

Maria Toyoda: You know, those are such formative years the ages between, you know, 17, 22, 23, that,it’s really, really difficult to compare those experiences with those people who have gone out and done other things. And that’s why I think there’s gotta be some recognition for those stop outs, or those adult learners who do go on to do other things. They bring life experience, but they also bring, most of the time they bring back a level of maturity and a level of just being able to navigate the world that your average 19-year-old is still developing.

So, I think that’s where we have to be careful with the data. Right? Let’s understand the context and let’s understand, you know, the particular trajectories of our different student groups. And that’s what we ask our institutions to do, know who your students are.

Drumm McNaughton: And that is such a critical piece. I could remember years ago, it used to be required of business schools, that someone would graduate, undergraduate, then they’d have to work in industry [00:13:30] for three to five years before coming back to go to business school, so that it’s not all book learning, they got actual experience. Now that’s changing and I suspect it’s gonna change even more with AI, that students are gonna need to go to graduate school much sooner to be able to get a job. Thoughts?

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, I think that’s been happening for quite some time. And it’s not just business school, but there are a lot of professional programs where you might be admitted, but more often than not, sometimes you would be told, “maybe you should go and do something else for a year or two and then come back and see if you wanna do this” or, you know, “we need you to bring those experiences back”.

And so business faculty have had to adjust the way that they teach because, of course, the economic imperative is now leading a lot of institutions to, you know, introduce the idea of graduate school much earlier than they had before. I think almost every institution that you look at has some form of an accelerated master’s program where they’re taking you right outta your junior year, let’s say—

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Three, two programs.

Maria Toyoda: —three twos or the four plus ones. And so, part of it is, you know, you don’t come with the same work and life experiences that, let’s say, the executive MBA program, Sloan Management School or something like that, you wouldn’t necessarily be coming in with that. But that isn’t to say that’s the wrong way of doing it though, Drumm. I mean, [00:15:00] there’s still a lot of things that you learn in business school that I think are valuable that employers, most importantly, employers are looking for. Right? They want you to know how to communicate, and analyze, use your critical thinking skills.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m wondering if some of the, and, we’re getting way off topic here, but it’s a fascinating conversation for me. I hope my listeners think the same too. I’m wondering if some of these same principles need to be applied to stopped out students or students who have gone away from higher ed and come back.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, and that might be the point here, is that, they are coming in with that life experience or work experience that is valuable. I think there are things that are related to prior learning assessments or competency based learning that in some ways we’re getting better at this where we can find some way to document that learning. It may not be formal learning, but it’s still learning. And there are outcomes that come from these experiences that can be documented. And sometimes when you bundle these things up and you assess them, they turn into a credit or two or three.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, I remember when I went into the, the Naval Academy back, I was 17 years old, they hit us with competency tests, you know, so placement. And I was able to validate a couple, three courses. Because of the high school education that I’d gotten. [00:16:30] You know, why couldn’t it be the same in higher ed? I think it is in some places.

Maria Toyoda: It is. And I would say the military is a fantastic example of it because the military itself does such a good job of those competency-based documentation so that wheninstitutions that accept those credits need to have that verification it’s there. Right? Then there are universities likeNational University that is expressly, their audience they know is military or ex-military and they have pathways for those students where explicitly they can bring their competency based credits in with them.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that’s important.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah. There’s a lot to learn from that system.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, so we’re seeing a ton of changes in higher ed, right now. We are you know, nine or 10 months into what I call T2, Trump’s second term. We’re seeing a lot of changes, and frankly, we’re seeing a lot of changes that were needed.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

Drumm McNaughton: So what are some of the areas that you see that are changing that have needed change?

Maria Toyoda: Yeah. Well, to sort of preface that, let me note that there are a lot of unwelcome things. You know, I have noted before that there’s a lot of noise, so there is a lot of noise.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

Maria Toyoda: But there’s a signal too, and I think that’s what you’re getting at. And the signal is about a move towards accountability and it’s a move that’s understanding the reasons why so many [00:18:00] students, why the majority of students and their families choose to access higher education. It is, as you say, to create a better life for themselves to be able to earn higher wages, to see more mobility come about. The students who, who complete a college degree have life benefits that just outpace the kinds of benefits that people who don’t go to college have.

Drumm McNaughton: Economically and otherwise.

Maria Toyoda: And otherwise, becauseas we know, socioeconomic status is so, highly, highly associated withhealth effects and relationship effects and all those sorts of things. So this is no small thing for us to acknowledge that that’s what college is for. And so if you focus on student success and accountability to institutionsis pretty important. And I don’t know if we’ll get a chance to talk a little bit about the work WASC has been doing on things like, you know, ROI and that kind of thing, but that is something we’re focused on.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, we’ll talk about that for sure.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah. Yeah. And just to sum up, things that I think all administrations to some degree have pointed to but there’s definitely urgency now that we didn’t see before. I still do think that there were better ways to do it, but it’s happening and institutions will respond. Accreditors will respond.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, accountability, the alignment, [00:19:30] workforce development. I’ve always said there’s a pendulum. One of them goes up to accountability, the other’s innovation or in this it’s workforce development versus pure research, et cetera. Some of it has to do with regulations, you know, more regulations, higher, oversight coming from the Department versus lesser, et cetera. It happens every time we have a change of administration. It happens every time we have a change of political party in Washington. If folks aren’t expecting that, then, you know, sorry. You, you really should expect it each time. One of the things you said though before was the focus on student debt and programmatic outcomes, and I think this is what you were referring to talking about WASC and ROI.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah. Debt is definitely one of the things that we keep a careful eye on. And I’ll note that one of the hangovers from the pandemic, it has been,an increase in loan defaults. And so this is gonna affect quite a few institutions. Primarily, though, they tend to affect trade schools and so forth, where there’s high level of debt, but the income that you get won’t ever be enough to pay off that debt. And so we’ve created a dashboard on our website, publicly available for all of our institutions, where people can look [00:21:00] up any institution that is receiving Title IV funding to see what the average debt load is. And you can do it on a programmatic basis. That’s something that I think is important. College Scorecard does a similar thing, we draw a lot of our data from College Scorecard. But what we’ve done also is to create a premium earnings to price metric, which—

Drumm McNaughton: Hmm.

Maria Toyoda: —gives you some sense of how long it’s gonna take you to pay off that debt.

Let’s say if you were a nursing major or if you were a political science major,from a programmatic basis. But we also let you benchmark and do peer groupings. So you can see if a selected institution, how that institution is doing relative to its cohort. They’re fun tools to play around with, but there’s real value in that information for consumers. Now we developed it primarily for our institutions and we hope that our institutions are regularly accessing that data and understanding where the improvements need to come.

Drumm McNaughton: Is it accessible to anybody?

Maria Toyoda: Anybody. Publicly, you don’t need to log in. You can go right to wscuc.org, click on the button that says KID. It’s called KID KID Key Indicator Dashboard, and we keep building out the functionality. So there’s a lot in there, but yeah, I encourage anyone interested to go in and play around with that.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, we’ll put that link in the show notes so people can go right to it. That is [00:22:30] interesting, now, is it just for WASC institutions that you’re highlighting or is it nationally?

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, presently it’s just the WASC. If the data is available nationally, we think that the, other agencies will have their opportunity to do this for their institutions also. But, you know, we certainly have access to the data for all institutions that are accredited Title IV recipients.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, this is keeping up with the same kind of transparency that Ralph Wolf put in years ago. Whereas WASC is the only, of the former regionals or any accreditor, that posts the visiting team report, that the commission action letter responses back and forth from a student perspective, from a parent’s perspective, if you’re going in and thinking about going to enroll at an institution, that’s important information for a student to have.

Maria Toyoda: Maybe it is. I will say that all accreditors, I think, are making good faith efforts to be transparent. What WASC has been out there first, and maybe we’re still far more open about posting our materials publicly. I sometimes wonder what parents and students may get out of those team reports. They are sometimes in the weeds and therefore, I, I would direct them to the KID, to the dashboard, because, you know, those reports are not that interesting.

Drumm McNaughton: I, I’m sorry. I [00:24:00] must be a nerd ’cause I find them fascinating.

Maria Toyoda: You’re, yeah, you’re an accrediting nerd, so you may not see as not interesting. I suppose if someone really, really wants to do a deep dive on these things, they could, they could go in. But I would steer people to the KID just because, you know, you have limited time to do research on these institutions, but the KID gives an awfully good, awfully good coverage of that.

And I would encourage people to go look at things like the College Scorecard and things like that. I would say that the one drawback from any of these things including the team reports, the commission action letters, and sometimes the data is that there’s a long lag period. You know, we’re talking about a lot of action letters that may have been written five years ago, and a lot of things can change in five years. But even with the KID data, you know, if you’re looking at the stuff that the College Scorecard or the Department of Labor or any of those other agencies are or projects are putting out there, it could be a little outdated.

Drumm McNaughton: Well I’m gonna have to challenge you on that one point because higher ed doesn’t change, so the data should be very accurate, even if it’s five or 10 years ago. Right? No, I’m just kidding.

Maria Toyoda: Well, it’s changing faster than ever now.

Drumm McNaughton: It certainly is. Which kind of brings us to the next thing, the changes that are going on right now, we’ve talked about accountability, alignment with workforce, student debt, programmatic outcomes, accreditation is starting to change as well. Is it not?[00:25:30]

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I do. I think that we are all, at least, well, let me just speak for WASC. I know that the conversations that the commissioners have, along with our staff liaisons and with our member institutions is what really matters to us when we do accreditation. And the thing that matters to us more than anything is student success. Right? So, the more that we drill down on that goal, student success, I think the better off we are. And so that means in some instances we may be streamlining our approach a bit.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

Maria Toyoda: Less focus, for instance, as we talked earlier on, on the inputs, but maybe starting with some of the data, getting into deep conversations on that.

You know, Jamie Studley, used to say “better data, better conversations”. I think she was absolutely right about that. Is that drill down on that data, but not take it at just face value. Start having conversations about that data. So I think for WASC, having better data does mean having deeper, better, more finely grained conversations.

You know, there’s always that push and pull of compliance, just to bring up another theme that we talked about earlier. So, I know we’re gonna talk a little bit more about the triad, but there is a sense that there’s, inherent tension between [00:27:00] being compliance oriented and being independent and autonomous, which is important. So these are all in discussion, they’re all in play. We don’t know what the outcome is yet. You know, not just clearing up up some compliance issues with the Department of Education and NASIQI, but we have negotiated rulemaking coming up. There’s some consequential things that are gonna be discussed there in early 2026. And then very soon after that, we start our re-recognition process. So there’s a, there’s a lot going on. But not quite clear what direction we’re headed in as far as the Department of Education is concerned.

Drumm McNaughton: I don’t think anybody understands where it’s going at this point. And like you say, there’s so many different balls in the air. The triad was established, and for folks who don’t understand the term “triad”, it really looks at the three entities that are responsible for overseeing American higher education. You have the accreditors, which were supposed to be independent, looking at quality student outcomes. You’ve got the state attorneys general who are responsible for the consumer aspects of it. And then you have the Department, which is the people who pass out the Title IV funding and set the regulations. I think I’ve got that right or pretty close to it. Do I not?

Maria Toyoda: Yes, yes, you do. I should put it this way, that the pressure for states to play a larger [00:28:30] role has never been stronger.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And that is not gone unnoticed. But for the triad to change in a meaningful way or even do away with the triad, it would require a reauthorization or a change to the Higher Education Act, at least from my perspective.

Maria Toyoda: From a legal perspective, I really can’t opine on that. But I wanna make the observation that it’s been quite some time since a permanent or more permanent reauthorization of the HEA has happened.

Drumm McNaughton: 12 years.

Maria Toyoda: And I would take that seriously. I’m not sure we want to give up the triad. Do we wanna say something more about No. No. You okay. You’re not, you’re not—

Drumm McNaughton: I’m, I, I don’t, I think the triad— Does it need some tweaks? Absolutely. But I think having independent adjudicators, basically it’s peer institutions going through and being the adjudicators for quality at higher education. One of the important things that’s made higher ed in the US, to use someone else’s words, the envy of the world, is the independence that it has to go in the directions that it needs.

Maria Toyoda: Well, that’s right. I mean, if you look at almost any other country, there’s some ministry of education, something like that, you know, overseeing and centralizing things. There are other systems too, you know, [00:30:00] Switzerland for instance, where you might have a somewhat more decentralized view of education. But that’s been the real secret to . the American dominance. First of all, education, higher education is the envy of the world, but remember, higher education underpins economic growth. It underpins innovation. Everything, you know, that’s meaningful to us. It has undergirded American power, frankly, you know. As a student of international relations I’m very keenly aware of that. But for accreditors, I can’t underscore the importance of autonomy. Yes, we are captured in the sense, as I mentioned before, that we’re the conduit through which, quite a bit of compliance has to happen. There’s a lot of monitoring that we have to do. And we have a portal for complaints and we handle a lot of things that are just, you know, really about compliance and consumer protection and those sorts of things. Those are not unimportant things. We wish that this was just about quality assurance, but it’s not. It’s about so much. I, think with the Title IV funding, this has become even more so the case. It’s really, really difficult to to extricate accreditation from that. But we’re independent agencies, and therefore the kinds ofwork that we do is not driven by the state or, you know, state writ large, the federal government. This allows [00:31:30] for great variation in how our institutions run and what their missions are.

Drumm McNaughton: And it’s interesting, the quote comes to mind from the movie, All the President’s Men, Hal Holbrook, and his character “follow the money”. It’s all about Title IV money.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah. And it shouldn’t be, it should be about other things too. But, but they are intertwined

Drumm McNaughton: Certainly are. So what’s next for higher ed accreditation? What more can accreditors be doing to ensuring student, you know, better student learning outcomes, better quality?

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, well, we’re very excited about the prospects that maybe say AI might hold for institutions in assessing students, in creating a robust anda smoother transfer process for students. I think we’re seeing a lot of innovation, as I mentioned before, in delivery of instruction. I think a lot of us coming out of the pandemic realized that, okay, when we said we were doing distance education, we basically just put things up on Zoom and called it distance education. And, and I think there’s a realization now that there’s a whole lot more to that than just putting your face on Zoom.

Drumm McNaughton: Ya think?

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, there’s some real opportunities here to, to think about. You know, one of my favorite modes for delivery is hybrid. You know, you have [00:33:00] both the things that you can do online, and then you have the in-person, what we call the low residency models, but you have an opportunity to come and meet your students and create community. You know, every day we see institutions being innovative and for accreditors, as accreditors, we’re saying bring it on. You know we love working with you. We love working with institutions to change things, to change the model, to change the approach.

We want institutions to find a way to keep costs low for students. We want them to use data and collect data and understand their students as best they can. We want them resourcing the things that really matter. So, you know, as much as there’s a, there’s a lot of, um, stirring drama out there about the, you know, about what’s happening, there’s also lots of good things happening.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. One of the neat things that I’m seeing, especially talking about online education or hybrid, is I’m seeing more and more institutions putting together a “school for better teaching”. You know where faculty go through that they learn new pedagogies, they learn things like that. I know WASC was, frankly, you guys were the first when it came to doing the Assessment Leadership Academy, which is now the Accreditation Leadership Academy. Is that something that WASC would consider doing, is a, you know, pedagogy [00:34:30] academy?

Maria Toyoda: We do have webinars. And a lot of our webinars are on topics related to teaching and learning. We don’t have any plans right now to expand that into a whole institute. And in fact there are lots of organizations that do have excellent institutes focused on specific issues around — AAC&U, for instance, has, fantastic institutes.

I do think though that, I would say that institutions that are sort of less resourced, may pull back on the kinds of resources they provide faculty in that area, like Centers for Teaching and Learning and so forth. Which, I’ve been always a huge fan of CTLs and when they are done well, yeah, yeah, I see you, hear you clapping, um, and, and, you know, people who do that work really deserve that kind ofcelebration. Somebody I, I taught for 30 years and I will say that I could still benefit from the kind of counseling and work and, you know, pedagogical improvements and tweaks and ideas.

You know, the other thing though that I’ve always encouraged faculty to do is to self-organize. There are great ways to organize among your peers in different, let’s, let’s say it different disciplines, make it interdisciplinary and talk about the most effective tools and processes and modes that you use in the classroom. That’s almost as effective as having a good programmatic CTL. And I’ve [00:36:00] learned a lot from, let’s say, faculty in places like engineering. You know, if you wanna talk about project-based learning or experiential learning, nobody does that better than engineering colleges. And the things that they do can be applied to just about any field, you know? So, there’s excellent work being done, it’s just you have to find ways of disseminating it. But we’ll continue to look at the ways in which our educational and training programs can provide resources for those institutions.

Drumm McNaughton: When you said that it, it reminded me, one of the first guests that I had on the podcast was a Dr. Judy Kjelstrom , who is from UC Davis. She ran the biotech program up there. And she said things were becoming so specialized when they were working on a problem they would have to bring in specialists, PhD specialists from biology, from mathematics, et cetera, et cetera, so people were having to work in teams. I think that is so critical because every discipline has their own way of approaching things. But if you have forced to work together, you know, AAC&U’s greatest skills, working in teams, number one, at least in the last survey. If you can bring folks together and understand their pedagogy, their teaching, their thought process, you become a better instructor yourself.

Maria Toyoda: I think so. Yeah. You [00:37:30] know, you can learn so much by watching a master teacher at work. And it is good to see that institutions are paying attention to it. It’s good to see that doctoral programs have started, you know, it was a push maybe 10, 15 years ago to get doctoral students to learn more about pedagogy. I can tell you that when I did it, there was nothing of the sort.

Drumm McNaughton: Me neither. So last question before we wrap up. Sharing among faculty, sharing among colleges is important and there are forums for that. Is there a forum for sharing among accreditors?

Maria Toyoda: There’s, well, you are familiar with CRAC of course, and we do do a lot of joint things. Like I mentioned, we’re doing a webinar today. What should probably be, you know, a little better developed as a kind of sharing among accreditors outside the former regionals. And I think Leah Matthews has done a lot of great work, she’s the executive director of DEAC, to try and bring people together. It’s just such a busy time though. It’s hard to get people to, to come together. But, you know, they’re programmatic accreditors, there are national accreditors, there are specialized accreditors. We have a lot to learn from each other. I think Nasser Paydar, the new, president of CHEA is doing what he can to try [00:39:00] and create some space for accreditors. But, uh, you know, he’s new to the job. CHEA may sound like it’s a group of accreditors, but it’s actually a group of institutions, who gather around accreditors. So it would be good to have a platform for accreditors. But right now I spend most of my time, in that regard, with the CRAC group.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, CRAC has got a wonderful mission. But I agree with you, I think a good place for accreditor institution sharing would be CHEA, a little bit different than what they’ve done, and even ACE.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, absolutely. I think ACE done a fantastic job of bringing all quarters of higher ed together. Yeah, associations, institutions. Yeah.

Drumm McNaughton: Any last thoughts for our audience? I mean, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

Maria Toyoda: Well, I would say stay tuned. There’s a lot going on and if you think you know something now it’s gonna be different.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh yeah, like that old Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times.

Maria Toyoda: Look, I’m, I’m bullish on, on higher ed. We, we get past some of the noise, as I said, pay attention to the signals and, you know, we will continue to have the best higher education sector in the world.

Drumm McNaughton: And we will continue to do so. Maria, thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation. As we always do, three takeaways for presidents and boards: [00:40:30] where should your ear be tuning in for what’s happening in accreditation?

Maria Toyoda: I think straight from the accreditors ourselves, we post a lot of things on our websites collectively speaking. So if you want the real news on what’s going on with accreditation, go to any of our websites and you’ll see updates. The Department of Education will also, although maybe, maybe they don’t up update as much, but yeah, I would say go straight to the source.

Drumm McNaughton: And what, what other do you think is really important for presidents and boards to know about accreditation and the times we live in today?

Well, that accreditors are really seeking to be partners. You know, we’re not swooping in once every 10 years just to nitpick. We, we really are here all the time. You’re, you’re, you’re here all the time to nitpick. Is that what you’re saying? Nah I’m joking.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah, we hear it all the time and everything. No, we do our monitoring work. We do that throughout, you know, the year. But each of us has our own way of interacting with our member institutions and our accreditation liaison officers. And when I say that the door is always open, I truly mean it. And it’s not, you know, just WASC, we are always open for business and always open for conversation.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, thank you. Those are great takeaways. You know, you’re there to partner, you’re not there— part of partnering is holding people’s feet to the fire, but that’s not the primary job. You’re focused on [00:42:00] student learning outcomes. What’s best for the student.

Maria Toyoda: Yeah. Perfectly put.

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you?

Maria Toyoda: Oh. I think for, for me, I’m just head down, going to continue to try and put out the message that WASC is gonna continue to innovate. We’re gonna continue to streamline, we’re gonna continue to help our institutions be better. We are all about continuous improvement. And so I couldn’t be happier than I am working with this group of people and with our institutions.

Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, thank you. You’ve got an incredible team there. WASC is, in my mind, has always been the creme de la creme. So thank you. Congratulations on the new position. I look forward to working with you over the years.

Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my guest, Dr. Maria Toyoda, President/CEO of WASC. Maria, thanks for being on the program, I look forward to the next time our paths cross. To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. I hope you’ve enjoyed the episode. I’ll see you next week.