The higher education world is abuzz about this week’s great piece in The Wall Street Journal questioning the effectiveness of higher education accrediting agencies, whose seal of approval is required for a college to receive federal student financial aid dollars. In the front-page article, Andrea Fuller and Douglas Belkin of the WSJ note that at least 11 accredited four-year colleges had federal graduation rates (excluding part-time and transfer students, among others) below 10%, which leads one to question whether accreditors are doing their job in ensuring institutional quality. A 2014 Government Accountability Office report concluded that accreditors are more likely to yank a college’s accreditation over financial concerns than academic concerns, calling for additional oversight from the U.S. Department of Education.
Congress has also been placing pressure on accreditors in recent weeks due to the collapse of the accredited Corinthian chain of for-profit colleges and the Department of Education’s announcement that at least some Corinthian students will qualify for loan forgiveness. The head of the main accreditation body responsible for most Corinthian campuses got grilled by Senate Democrats in a hearing this week for not pulling the campuses’ accreditation before the chain collapsed. As a part of the (hopefully) impending reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are interested in a potential overhaul of the accreditation system.
Students, their families, policymakers, and the general public have a clear and compelling interest in reading the reports from accrediting agencies and knowing whether colleges are facing sanctions for some aspect of academic or fiscal performance. Yet these reports, which are produced by nonprofit accrediting agencies, are rarely available to the public. For the WSJ piece, the reporters were able to use open-records requests to get accreditation reports for 50 colleges with the lowest graduation rates. I was recently at a conference where the GAO presented on their aforementioned accreditation report and asked whether the data they compiled on accreditor sanctions was available to the public. They suggested I file an open records request, something which I’ve (unsuccessfully) done for another paper.
Basic information about a college’s accreditation status and reports -including any sanctions and key recommendations for improvement—should be readily available to the public as a requirement for federal financial aid eligibility. And this should cover all types of colleges, including private nonprofit and for-profit colleges that accept federal funds. The federal government doesn’t necessarily have to get involved in an accreditation process (a key concern of colleges and universities), but it can use its clout to make additional data available to the public. (Students probably won’t go to the college’s website and read the reports, but third-party groups like guidance counselors and college rankings providers would work to get the information out in more usable form.) A little sunshine in the accreditation process has the potential to be a wonderful disinfectant.
[Cross-posted at Kelchen on Education]
