By Professor
Doom
So I’m looking over a report detailing why accreditation is
a joke. It has many
things right, but I feel the need to clarify a few things, especially when the
report tries to say that accreditation is a barrier to making improvements in
higher education.
“…the requirement that prospective
colleges allow for on-site evaluations (meaning that they effectively have to
be already in operation with professors teaching courses and students taking
classes) creates a “built-in Catch-22 for innovators and entrepreneurs—you
can’t be accredited (get access to public money) until you have proved yourself
in advance. You can’t prove yourself in advance—prospectively—unless you are
accredited.”[29]
This is certainly true, but the report
neglects to mention how this came to be. In the mid/late 19th
century, the various higher educational institutions in North America got
together to pick each other’s brains as far as best ideas for running such
institutions. The schools were already legitimate, they were interested in
becoming better.
So, from the ground up, a school that
wanted to become accredited needed to be a SCHOOL first, and then get
accreditation. Accreditation was voluntary, after all, and so this wasn’t a
barrier to schools forming. Just as you must write a book before you can hope
to get rave reviews from critics, expecting to become accredited before the
school opens its doors isn’t a barrier…it’s just common sense.
“One estimate of the market value of
accreditation is $10 million. No wonder that some for-profit colleges decided
to purchase nonprofits in order to inherit their accreditation and avoid the
costly headache of seeking first-time regional accreditation.[30]”
--
The barrier to entry, and the bogus nature of accreditation once
received (schools get to decide for themselves if they’re legitimate, once
accredited), make this an excellent strategy for a for-profit school. Buy a non-profit that was trying to be legitimate, then sell out the
prestige and plunder students of their loan money is a tried and true tactic for profits. Again, it’s the loan scam that’s
the problem here, not that the report connects the dots.
On the other hand, tying Federal student
loan money to accreditation is foolishness, because now only accredited schools
can get that ridiculous flow of money. So, yeah, because of the student loan
scam, accreditation is a serious barrier to new schools that cannot hope to
compete. It’s as reasonable as expecting restaurants to only be able to sell to
the public after 5 years of rave reviews from critics (critics that,
incidentally, don’t even pay for their own meals).
Take away the student loan scam, and the
horrible, broken, fraud that is accreditation becomes irrelevant in higher
education. It’ll dry up and blow away, or so it should unless it cleans up its
act.
The report continues, but doesn’t think
things through:
Hindering
Innovation. In addition to
insulating colleges from normal market forces, the existing accreditation
system reduces the incentive for colleges to revise their existing business
models and make the reforms needed to spark innovation. For instance, one
regional accreditation agency—the Western Association of Schools and
Colleges—requires any university that wants to make a substantive change
(defined broadly as anything that may affect the school’s quality or
objectives) to submit a detailed report to the agency at least four months
before the implementation date of the proposed change.
While in theory, this is certainly true,
but didn’t the report just get through saying that for-profits buy up already
accredited schools? That’s a substantive change and a total revision of the
business model, too. If accreditation were legitimate, that sort of thing
couldn’t happen. The report probably should have spent more time investigating
why accreditation is such a fraud.
The report then starts to scrape the
bottom of the barrel for criticisms of accreditation, even though “it’s a total
fraud” really strikes me as the way to go:
Creating a Limited Vision of What
Higher Education Can Be. Perhaps most frustrating of all,
however, is the manner in which the existing accreditation regime limits the
vision of higher education and creates an inflexible college experience for
students.
I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old
man telling kids to get off my lawn, but I do humbly point out education, for
the last few thousand years, has primarily involved study, and reading and
writing about what was studied. Maybe change should be slow here.
The report, earlier, pointed out how
accreditation already allows for education to no longer include studying,
reading, and writing, so that seems pretty flexible to me. In fact, I find this
flexibility a problem, since now it’s quite common to have people with advanced degrees, deep in
student debt, with no measureable skills or knowledge gained after 6 or more
years of higher education. This happens because these students, despite being at accredited
schools, don’t have to study, to read, or to write. How is this NOT a problem?
Don’t get me wrong, accreditation is a
fraud and I love when others agree that it is, but it really seems like there’s
an agenda to this report.
The report goes on to discuss in detail
MOOCs, online coursework. I’ve written before that there’s little reason to suspect any
online coursework is legitimate, and the “real world” has already figured out the minimal
value of online degrees. Again, I’m not sure how a report criticizing how
accreditation is stifling innovation can then spend time listing all the
various accredited online options around…sure looks like accreditation allows
for innovation to me. Accreditation DOES allow innovation.
What
accreditation doesn’t do, and this is the
important part, is assure any sort of legitimacy to any sort of educational
institution…I really think any report on accreditation should have focused on
this issue.
Ignoring the incoherency of the thesis in
the report, the report goes back to saying relevant things:
Different Business Models:
Credentialing Skills, not Seat Time. As MOOCs begin to
disrupt the antiquated and ineffective model of higher education, the market is
beginning to address another critical piece of the higher education puzzle:
institutions that move beyond the traditional concept of the bachelor’s degree.
And here, I have to agree completely, with
some clarification. There are many myths about higher education that have
tricked a generation of young people into thinking they must pursue higher
education to succeed in life (I encourage the reader to click that link and
search through my blog for discussion of those myths). One of the most
important myths concerns higher education being necessary for a good job.
Higher education is only coincidentally
about job skills, and that blurring has led to the doom of many a poor fool
(led by giggling administration!) into endless student debt. That student loan
money should instead, for many people, go to actual job skills, to teaching
those skills, to credentialing those skills.
But, that’s not higher education. Don’t
get me wrong, fixing a car, repairing air conditioners, and installing
electrical wiring are every bit as honorable, and important, to humanity as
philosophy, mathematics, physics, and all the other “ancient” topics of higher
education.
But these things are not all the same. A
garage is a great place to learn about fixing cars, but not really the best
place to discuss mathematics. A workshop is a wonderful place for learning
carpentry, but not so much for philosophy. Similarly, I wouldn’t dream of
taking a student to a classroom to teach him how to pilot a plane (at least,
not for the important skills), or how to play piano. It’s pretty stunning,
actually, that people got confused about where to go to learn real job skills,
because the local university never was the best place to be for that.
Accreditation, however, didn’t cause this
confusion…it was clueless/corrupt administration, willing to say anything
(including that ridiculous line about “college graduate makes a million more
dollars”) to grab
more student loan money that caused this confusion. Accreditation, being bogus,
simply didn’t do anything to stop it.
The report eventually makes three
recommendations to improve higher education. Let’s take a look:
1.
End government sanctioning of
accrediting agencies and allow any institution to accredit courses. At the same time, accreditation should be voluntary, and
accrediting entities’ reputations should rest with market forces, not
government institutions. The abundance of online information, coupled with the
self-interest of students to be competitive in the job market, “reduces the
problem of fraudulently low-quality education to one of de minimis proportions.”[57]
--Really, allow institutions to simply accredit themselves? Oops. See,
the reason why accreditation is a fraud (as the report points out!) is the
conflict of interest we have now. The people running the institutions are the
same as those running accreditation…no kidding there’s a conflict of interest.
Institutions already basically self-accredit, which is why most of higher
education is a fraud today.
--“accreditation should be voluntary” says this recommendation, but
accreditation is ALREADY voluntary. You just can’t compete with the accredited
schools, since they get all the loan money. Hmm, the loan money seems to be the
problem…
So this is a terrible
recommendation, almost as though the report wasn’t paying attention to what it
said earlier.
2.
Avoid federal “scorecards.” A seductive idea, even among some critics of today’s accreditation
system, is to have the federal government replace or supplement federally
driven accreditation with a scorecard that seeks to measure the output of
colleges by criteria such as graduation rates, employability of graduates, and
value for money. Such federal intervention would be a mistake: Existing
institutions that are comfortable within the cocoon of protectionist
accreditation would lobby hard, and no doubt effectively, for output measures
that define success in their own terms. Moreover, a competing range of such
private outcomes-based scorecards already exists, sponsored by such bodies as U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, ACTA, and Kiplinger’s.
The only way this recommendation could make any sense is if it also recommended getting rid of the Federal student loan scam. Hey look, one more recommendation:
3.
Decouple accreditation and
federal funding. ACTA notes that once
accreditation agencies became the gatekeepers for federal funding, “accreditors
essentially gained regulatory control over colleges.”[58] Federal policymakers should therefore
decouple accreditation and federal funding through amendments to the Higher
Education Act, eliminating the necessity that colleges get accredited by the
government-sanctioned system. This reform would allow independent accrediting
institutions to enter the market, thereby providing students with numerous
options for creating their “degree” and shaping their college experience.
--Sure,
decouple accreditation from funding, I already figured that out from the rest
of the report. There’s no recommendation here for what should replace it. My
vote would be to change the rules of accreditation to make it legitimate
(primarily by putting educators that actually teach in charge of education and
teaching), but failing that, here’s a recommendation from me that would go a
long way to cleaning up the corruption and fraud in higher education, and
eliminate the conflicts of interest in accreditation, in one blow:
Recommendation
#1: Get rid of the Federal student loan scam.
Seriously, it’s that simple. Do this, and
accreditation becomes no more relevant to the world than a Saturday morning
cartoon, which, frankly, is all it deserves at this point.
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