After decades in the shadows, the gatekeepers who determine which colleges can access taxpayer money through student loans will have to start operating in the sunlight.
Information about how college accreditation companies operate will be made public on the internet as part of a set of reforms announced Friday by the Obama administration. Communication between companies and schools at risk of losing their accreditation will be published on a website, along with information about the standards that different accreditors use in evaluating schools.
Friday’s move stops short of what a number of higher education experts believe is needed. “This is not a dramatic change. This is tweaking the existing system,” former Lafayette College president Arthur Rothkopf told the Huffington Post.
But there’s little the administration can do on its own to set more ambitious checks and balances on the relationship between schools and their accreditors. Congress tied the executive branch’s hands on accreditation in 2008 with a law that prevents the ED from setting national accreditation standards tied to actual student achievement.
And the new transparency should at least help to demystify the heavily fragmented accreditation process. There are 52 separate accrediting agencies that enjoy formal recognition from the Department of Education (ED), most of them specialized to cover narrow sub-sets of the higher education industry. Any given school’s formal accreditation could therefore mean a wide variety of different things about its actual performance. Prior to the new disclosures, customers shopping around for a wise educational investment would have had no way to see what a given school’s accredited status really means.
Such a disconnect between what an accreditor’s stamp signals to prospective students and what it actually reflects about the practical value of any given degree can have disastrous results. Disgraced and bankrupt for-profit college chain Corinthian enjoyed full accreditation throughout its existence despite ample evidence that it was not delivering a high-quality education or a high-value degree to the vast majority of people who took out burdensome student loans to purchase its offerings.
The group that signed off on Corinthian for years is called the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS). It continues to enjoy formal recognition from the ED as an accreditor, even as the legal and economic fallout from decades of abusive business practices at Corinthian mounts.
A line in a spreadsheet released Friday as part of the new ED transparency push indicates that performance problems with ACICS-accredited schools are widespread. Half its schools rank in the bottom third of the nation on students’ future earnings, and three quarters are in the bottom third on student loan repayment rates.
The figures illustrate both the potential and the limitations of what the ED is doing: Citizens can now access the kind of data that raises red flags about an accreditor, but the agency can’t actually raise that flag itself. Individual shoppers have to do the legwork in Excel spreadsheets and in conversations with college administrators about who accredits their school and how.
As the Corinthian saga illustrates, though, few would-be students are suspicious of accreditation standards in the ways that would prompt someone to critically interrogate aggressive marketing pitches from schools. And while Corinthian’s demise removes one potential predator from the higher education market, it does little to protect students from getting fleeced. When the school started closing campuses in California in the spring, dozens of other expensive for-profit schools descended to hold impromptu college fairs for the shell-shocked Corinthian customers who’d just learned their schools were closing up shop.