BY BOBBY HALTON
The art of professional fire-fighting is defined as the expert application of a carefully considered set of physical tasks to a dynamically dangerous situation that results in calming, controlling, or ending that dangerous situation and restoring normalcy. That activity involves making hundreds of decisions and executing numerous policies and procedures—all manufactured with a great amount of flexibility to allow the professional firefighter the latitude to use whatever is necessary for the situation at hand.
Putting together thousands of hours of study and thousands more of drill and training to safely and effectively respond to almost every imaginable type of emergency is the hallmark of a professional doing our work today.
To be more effective and efficient, we devote long hours to study, attend lectures, read books, and complete courses in colleges both online and offline. The nature of our schedules, both career and volunteer, have more and more students of the fire service turning to online education for their degrees.
The online education explosion we now take for granted experienced a few hiccups in its development, as most new concepts do. There were questions regarding the quality of the information being passed on to the students, but that has been addressed in part by the intense regulation all institutions—including the online institutions—receive from the United States Department of Education (DOE).
The choices are plentiful for a fire science student; there are both nationally and regionally accredited schools that must pass rigorous inspection by the DOE for accreditation as educational providers. Many federal institutions have no reservations about the quality and capability of the nationally accredited institutions to impart quality learning. Credits earned in nationally accredited institutions are accepted by the Officer Candidate Schools for all military branches, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the DOE, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). However, there are federal schools that don’t accept nationally accredited degrees—for example the Army, the Navy, and Air War Colleges.
The National Fire Academy (NFA) is one of the most cherished institutions in the fire service. It is run by a superintendent, Denis Onieal, whom most firefighters recognize as the epitome of integrity, character, and distinction. Onieal says, “Now is the time for the fire community to embrace the future and improve our education through distance learning ….” However, the NFA, which is under the DHS and not an accredited institution, does not accept distance learning credits from nationally accredited institutions.
The issue at hand is regional vs. national accreditation. The NFA accepts credits from regionally accredited institutions but not from nationally accredited institutions. That means a firefighter who obtains a degree from a nationally accredited institution cannot apply for the Executive Fire Officer (EFO) program—an issue that has been the source of much debate and heated passions. Regional accreditation is a long-standing requirement for EFO; the Board of Visitors, in 2009, reviewed the issue of national accreditation and rejected it.
According to the DOE, “The goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality.” So what is the difference between regional and national accreditation? Regionally accredited institutions must be accredited by one of six regional accrediting bodies. These associations started as traditional “brick and mortar” physical institutions grouped together in their regions of the country.
National accreditation is not based on geography. It was designed to evaluate and regulate specific types of schools and colleges. For example, the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology evaluates career schools and technology programs. The Distance Education and Training Council (DETC) accredits colleges that offer distance education. National accreditation began as schools with common themes or purposes grouped together. In a nutshell, regionally accredited agencies concentrate on specific areas of the country. National accreditation agencies can represent colleges across the United States and abroad.
According to the DOE, all accreditation is voluntary. Both national and regional accreditations involve detailed and extensive reviews of the school’s programs, campuses, faculty educational delivery methods, and finances. Schools must be accredited to secure federal financial aid for students. Recently, the DOE has mandated that all institutions show that the education they are providing in every course they offer has value in the job market—in other words, employers will value it, or students will be able to use it to find jobs. “We’ve elevated the scrutiny tremendously,” says Dr. Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits many postsecondary institutions.
The issue for the fire service is this: Are nationally accredited institutions disreputable “diploma mills” just casually granting degrees, or is it a matter of trepidation that prevents traditional physical institutions from accepting the challenge presented by today’s flourishing online competition? There have been missteps and oversights by both regional and national accreditation bodies; no institution is perfect. The question to ask is, could the NFA take a more inclusive position that would require all schools regionally accredited and nationally accredited to be evaluated separately on a case-by-case basis to determine if the education they provide meets NFA standards? Another approach may be to consider schools that have DETC accreditation, as this is focused on education and training accreditation.
Online education is not going away; nor should it, and many online programs are nationally accredited. Should all national accreditation continue to be automatically disqualified? Can we manage a case-by-case review? These are the questions to ask, and the answers must be factual and documented, not opinion. The real issue is how to best provide fair and equal access to education, especially federally funded education for the entire firefighting community.
Fire Engineering Archives
