College accreditation is one of the least understood and most important issues in higher education. It is the process by which private, nonprofit organizations recognized by the federal government decide whether a college meets basic standards of academic quality, financial stability, and institutional performance. The findings of this process have enormous consequences for the institution, including its ability to access federal student grants and loans. Now that the U.S. Department of Education has completed the opening round of public negotiations over a major accreditation overhaul, accreditation will likely garner more public attention.
The Department’s Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization, or AIM, process is not a modest tune-up of the rules governing the nation’s dozens of regional and national accreditors, such as the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and the Distance Education Accrediting Commission for online schools. The proposed rules, being hammered out by federal officials and the non-federal representatives of key stakeholder groups, are a broad effort to remake accreditation, including more competition among accreditors, fewer barriers for new accreditors, stronger accountability for student outcomes, and a system that’s responsive to taxpayers. One round of negotiations finished in April, and another is scheduled for May.
Those goals are consistent with the Education Department’s February announcement that it was reducing barriers for new accreditors, noting that few new accreditors have received federal recognition in recent decades. The case for reform is not hard to understand. The current system has long been criticized for being insular, process-heavy, and weakly tied to students’ success following graduation.
In the Education Department’s presentation and in the discussion that followed at its week-long opening round of public negotiations held in Washington, D.C., Department officials and the key stakeholder groups repeatedly noted that long-standing regional accreditors still dominate oversight of institutions, enrollment, and federal student-aid dollars. Voluntary switching by institutions from one accreditor to another is rare. And student outcomes vary widely across post-secondary institutions within the same accrediting agencies.
That’s not a trivial indictment. It suggests that accreditation is less an important validation of quality than a cozy arrangement among incumbents. Some of the Education Department’s ideas follow naturally from that diagnosis. These ideas include making it easier for institutions seeking to become accreditors to gain recognition, thus easing the path for colleges to switch accreditors. Another idea: using risk-based institutional reviews to focus federal scrutiny on the institutions that oversee the most student-aid dollars, draw the most complaints, or are growing quickly.
