Some issues in higher education are obvious and newsworthy—expensive tuition, say, or protesting students pitching tents on the campus quad. Others, though equally serious, are less visible. Accreditation, for example, is a problem that gets comparatively little attention, even as it slowly erodes the foundations of higher education.
College accreditors have gatekeeping power over federal funding. Federal financial aid, such as Pell Grants and student loans, goes only to students attending accredited colleges. Since few colleges can survive without access to Pell Grants and student loans, accreditors hold enormous power over colleges’ very existence.
What is accreditation? Essentially, it is peer review among colleges. To obtain accreditation, a college invites representatives from other colleges to determine whether it passes muster. The current system is deeply flawed, for five main reasons.
Accreditors fail their quality-assurance role. Their gatekeeping role for federal funding is premised on the idea that accreditors will ensure a minimum level of quality. They fail to do so.
To begin with, accreditation’s structure is designed around a historical quality-improvement role rather than its current quality-assurance function. Accreditation began in the early twentieth century with a focus on quality improvement as colleges banded together to identify and remedy weaknesses and encourage the spread of best practices. After the federal government started providing massive and sustained financing for higher education, accreditors were tasked with quality assurance. But the underlying structure of accreditation never changed to reflect this new priority. While a committee of peers makes a good arrangement for quality improvement, it is ill-suited for quality assurance.
Indeed, quality improvement and quality assurance are fundamentally incompatible. It’s not possible to be both a consultant and a regulator. You highlight your problems with a consultant so that he can help you fix them. You hide or minimize your problems from a regulator so that he doesn’t shut you down.
Moreover, accreditors don’t define quality, let alone ensure that colleges meet a minimum threshold of it. In practice, accreditors usually let each college define quality for itself and largely determine whether it is meeting that threshold. Unsurprisingly, few colleges fail this test. In a report for the Postsecondary Commission, a new nonprofit seeking to become a federal university accreditor, Yazmin Guzman and Stig Leschly found that just 2 percent of students attended colleges that a regional accreditor had disciplined for “poor academic quality or low student outcomes.”
Accreditors ignore outcomes by focusing on a recipe. As George Leef and Roxana Burris write in a report for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, “the accreditation system is not based on an evaluation of the results of an institution, but rather upon an evaluation of its inputs and processes. If the inputs and processes look good, acceptable educational quality is assumed.” This one-size-fits-all approach severely circumscribes the diversity and autonomy of colleges and suppresses innovation. If new ways to deliver a higher-quality or lower-cost education exist, the mandated recipe makes it unlikely that we will find them.
Accreditation is like a cartel. Accreditation committees are made up overwhelmingly of staff from other colleges that the accreditor oversees. This creates obvious “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” issues for colleges already in the club. Even worse are the effects for new colleges, which must get permission from their competitors to enter the market. The results are what you would expect from a cartel: easy renewal of accreditation for insiders and formidable barriers to entry for new competitors.
Accreditation increases costs. Accreditor recommendations are like an offer you can’t refuse from a mobster. The threat of revoking accreditation (and with it federal funding) means that accreditors almost always get what they ask for. “They blackmail us,” former college president John V. Lombardi says. “If they say your department of astrophysics needs 12 spaceships and you have only 10, you had better get the other two.”
Accreditors abuse their power. The American Bar Association, accreditor of law schools, insisted that colleges ignore state laws that the ABA disapproves of. Accreditors also push their favored ideologies. Adam Kissel and Tim Rosenberger have documented scores of examples of accreditors pushing progressive agendas.
Virtually everyone who has examined the accreditation system has harshly criticized it. Some on the right want to strip accreditors of their gatekeeping role. Some on the left want the Department of Education to take over the quality-assurance role. I have proposed an escape-hatch plan, which would let college programs that can demonstrate sufficient value-added learning or earnings outcomes forgo accreditation entirely while leaving accreditation in place for the rest. For example, many students in fields like law and accounting take certification exams administered by third parties. Colleges that substantially boost their students’ achievement on such exams could have their accreditation requirements waived. Similarly, programs that enhance their students’ earnings by substantially more than the cost of providing the education could forgo accreditation.
All these plans have their pros and cons. Alas, none has gained any momentum. Until we can agree on something better, we’ll be stuck with the current accreditation system, which is not serving the needs of colleges, parents, or students.
Photo: Aaron Hawkins / E+ via Getty Images
