The Broken Accreditation System

No one emerged looking worse from Wednesday’’s Senate hearing on for-profits than Michale McComis, the executive director of the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges. That’s saying something given that the first two hours of the hearing were devoted to damning undercover video of admissions counselors encouraging prospective students to lie on aid applications; inflating career earnings potential; and admitting they weren’t going to repay $85,000 of their own loan debt because they have a “tomorrow’s never promised” attitude.

The anger toward McComis could have been expected. The people in the video had their faces blurred out, no school officials were present, and he was the only person testifying with any authority over the exposed colleges. But the ire from the Senators–especially Minnesota Democrat Al Franken and Committee Chair Tom Harkin of Iowa–wasn’t about a few captured instances of fraud. Rather it reflected frustration with the breakdown of the entire system that is supposed to prevent these kinds of concerns in the first place.

Harkin and Franken aren’t alone. McComis is the second high-level accreditation agency official to be dragged before a Congressional panel in as many months. And in both cases it’s been clear that Congress’ patience with the accreditation system is wearing thin.

There’s a couple reasons for this disappointment and not all of them are necessarily the accreditors’ fault. For one, it might be that we simply expect too much out of a system that is just not equipped to handle the modern day higher education sector. ACCSC has 32 employees and accredits 951 schools, many of which have multiple campuses and can be spread throughout the country. About one-third of those schools get reviewed every year. It’s just not feasible to expect these agencies to conduct reasonable assessments of academic content, financial resources, admissions, and everything else in just a day or two.

The functions we expect of accreditors and what they actually do don’t match up either. We think of accreditors as regulatory bodies that oversee schools. But the word  but the word you these agencies most often use to describe their relationship with schools is “partner.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with collaboration, but that makes it nearly impossible to serve as a third-party arbiter.

That said, there are some fundamental problems about accrediting agencies and the accrediting system that hurt its ability to provide the oversight and accountability functions we desire.

Money

The most prominent problem is money. Accreditors charge fees to schools that are applying for accreditation. ACCSC, for example, charges around $9,500 for the initial accreditation process and then collects annual fees. Without schools to accredit, there’s no incoming cash flow for the organization. What complicates this further is that institutions can choose whatever national accreditor* they want, so if an agency gets a reputation for being too tough the schools can just go elsewhere. This creates a bizarre scenario in which holding tough standards could actually result in an accreditor putting itself out of business.

There’s an obvious fix–eliminate the direct money line. Instead of paying accrediting agencies directly, each school would transfer funds to a central account at the U.S. Department of Education. The Department would then dole out funds to accrediting agencies and could base compensation rates also on data collected during the process of approving or renewing accreditors. This doesn’t entirely limit the financial link between schools and accreditors, but it at least weakens it.

Too Much Flexibility

Schools that are unhappy with their accreditors, are moving to another location, or are trying to switch from national to regional accreditation may all end up changing agencies at some point. That all seems fine and it makes sense to allow some flexibility in the system.

What’s not OK is that a school can switch accreditors if it gets a negative report and wants to avoid trouble. That’s the equivalent of an athlete on the verge of becoming academically ineligible transferring schools to avoid penalties. Except in the athlete’s case, he or she would have to sit out at least a year, while the school continues to have access to federal student aid dollars. In fact, McComis noted during the hearing that his organization had produced a negative report about one of the schools caught on camera but that it’s still accredited by ACCSC while it looks for a new agency. That kind of run from justice should no longer be allowed. Accreditation transfers should have to be approved by the Department of Education and any schools that wish to switch agencies following an adverse report should have to give up their access to federal aid funds for at least one year.

Clearer Probation Standards

Being on accreditation probation often sounds like something out of Animal House. There are too many different levels and almost none of them mean anything more than an additional visit. There’s also no guarantee that probation at one agency will mean the same thing at another. It’s time to set up a clear standard of what probation means for all agencies, set up a couple of different levels, and establish specific penalties that are exacted if a school ends up in probation repeatedly over time. Greater coherence in the probation and penalty system makes it easier to judge the effectiveness of individual accreditors and makes the threat of action more powerful.

Stop the Secrecy

Accreditors’ work is hard to understand because almost all the reports they produce are kept confidential. And when parts of these reports do come out, they’re more redacted than classified intelligence. Accreditors defend the secrecy as protecting a climate of collaboration that allows schools and the agency to be honest and share critiques. That’s fine, but these aren’t nuclear launch codes.  I’d even guess that 90 percent of them are pretty dull. But we don’t really know because the vast majority of schools and accreditors keep these reports under lock and key. To be fair, the Department of Education doesn’t publish every program review, but at least it is subject to the Freedom of Information Act; there’s no recourse to accreditation agencies.

But again, this all plays into incentives. Why should one accreditor release more data or reports than another? There’s no benefit and it only increases the likelihood that the schools it monitors might want to go elsewhere. Altruism is great, but it’s foolish to expect on this large a scale.

Time to Reboot

Toward the end of Wednesday’s hearing, Harkin promised that his committee would take a closer look at accreditation this fall. Certainly a few more accreditation officials will get their round of tongue-lashing. But eventually we have to make a decision about what to do about these agencies. The current system and incentive structure around accreditation doesn’t work. We expect too much, create no reasons for being a better actor, and shroud the whole thing in secrecy.

Going forward we need to consider dramatically narrowing accreditors’ functions. Maybe they should only take care of academic-related issues, such as reviewing courses and programs. That’s generally handled using a team of outside subject matter experts anyway, which isn’t a terrible way to do it. But to this smaller function we need to fix the compensation structure so that they aren’t beholden to colleges for financial support and make it so that these agencies aren’t afraid to actually hand down punishments.

Part of this narrowing also means it is time to end the link between accreditors and federal student aid eligibility. There’s too much money the system is too complex to leave this function just to a small third-party agency. All of these finances and fraud concerns need to be handled at the national level by a separate group. (Whether that’s the Department of Education or someone else is up for discussion.) Either way, the end result should be a two-stage process that allows one agency to focus solely on learning and academics and the other to deal with finances, fraud, and the like. Today’s universities can be just as complicated as large corporations but with an academic unit thrown in. It’s time to treat them as such and deal with these issues separately.

*There are two types of accrediting agencies–regional and national. Most traditional four-year universities have regional accreditaiton, which is considered to be of a higher standard. Regional accreditors only oversee schools in their geographic area, but national agencies can have schools throughout the country.

Tagged as: Accreditation, For-Profit Colleges, U.S. Senate