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While all members of the triad have seen their roles and scope change dramatically since their inception, accreditors may have claim to the most substantial shift. What started in the 1800s as a voluntary system of institutional peer review became a high-stakes role as the gatekeeper to significant federal dollars. Despite putting federal money on the line, beginning in the 1950s with the second GI Bill, the federal government did not want primary responsibility for the gatekeeping function, and instead deferred to accreditors.¹ In 1965, the scope and stakes of accreditors’ roles changed tremendously with the advent and growth of programs under the Higher Education Act. Today, accreditors are gatekeepers to more than $120 billion in federal dollars annually, most of which is borrowed by—and must be repaid by—students.

This is a tremendous responsibility for a largely volunteer labor force that is interested in institutional improvement and inclined against institutional sanctioning, particularly since the agencies’ revenue and board membership come from the very institutions they accredit. And yet, the accreditors’ stamp of approval provides the public, and even policymakers, with the (sometimes false) perception that the institution is a quality one. Their stamp also opens the spigot to allow billions and billions of federal dollars to flow, including to schools that have failed students badly and sometimes at tremendous scale.

These problems with accreditors and our cobbled-together quality assurance system are well documented. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a book in 2013 that identified the lack of quality as one of the top issues plaguing the American postsecondary education system. The usually restrained OECD rang alarm bells, warning that the current system linking federal financial aid eligibility to the existing quality assurance system was “unsustainable.”² The OECD continued, “the postsecondary quality assurance system is weak and inconsistent, [and] places too great reliance on institutional accreditation arrangements…. The blend of this system with increasing tuition fees, constrained public budgets and broader economic distress creates a dangerous mix with financial risks both for individuals and lending bodies, including the federal government.”³

"The usually restrained OECD rang alarm bells, warning that the current system linking federal financial aid eligibility to the existing quality assurance system was “unsustainable.”

In short, accreditation is not working as it needs to—not for students who borrow to attend accredited schools they believe will serve them well, and not for taxpayers, whose dollars are used to prop up schools that are not working.

This realization is nothing new. The most significant recent iteration of attempting to name and solve the problems with accreditation began back in 2005, when Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the formation of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. This group was not just ambitious in name, but also in the scope of issues it sought to tackle: access, affordability, quality, accountability, and innovation. Not surprisingly, given their gatekeeping role to billions of dollars, accreditors found themselves in the crosshairs.

The commission’s final report stated that accreditation had "significant shortcomings" and needed a "transformation."⁴ The commission’s report found, among other things, that accreditors focused too much on inputs and not enough on outcomes; that they did not have standards that allowed for comparison across colleges; that they did not report measurable progress; and that their processes were not open or transparent. And the commission did not just identify the problems; it called for action to resolve them. With Secretary Spellings in a position to do just that, she began the process of initiating a rulemaking to help make the commission’s vision a reality.

But nothing upsets the higher education sector more than the federal government looking at issues of quality and asking for accountability. The reaction from accreditors and schools was swift and strong. The dreaded “slippery slope” and the horrors to which it could lead were invoked. Judith Eaton, the president of the country’s largest institutional higher education membership organization, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), warned that "we could end up with national standards and federally set levels of expectations.”⁵ She warned that ”those efforts would convert the accreditation process "from a collegial activity to a regulatory one,” highlighting the fact that—despite being legally tasked as the gatekeepers to federal money—accreditors do not see themselves as regulators.⁶ Accreditors and schools started pounding the pavement in the marbled halls of Congress to stop the regulations, and Congress obliged.

Senator Lamar Alexander, then-ranking member of the Senate education committee, warned Secretary Spellings in a 2007 floor speech that, if she were to move forward with her plan to publish a final rule on accreditation before Congress acted, he would author an amendment prohibiting her from doing so.⁷ Shortly after, a bipartisan group of 18 of the 21 education committee members wrote a letter asking her to refrain from regulating until after Congress passed the Higher Education Act reauthorization.⁸ The House got in on the action, too, by putting language in its draft spending bill to prevent the Secretary from using any of those funds to enact the regulations.⁹

Secretary Spellings got the message, and did not finalize the regulations. But when Congress finally did pass the legislation, in the form of the Higher Education and Opportunity Act of 2008, it did little to strengthen requirements for accreditors, or for the standards they apply to the institutions they approve. Instead, it took a fairly dramatic step to weaken federal oversight of accreditors by banning the Education Department from specifying how accreditors look at student achievement in their standards.¹⁰

Since 2008, the situation has deteriorated. In 2014, Corinthian Colleges collapsed despite being in good standing with the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS). A few years after that, ITT Tech followed suit, and then Education Corporation of America and its 70 campuses.¹¹ Both ECA and ITT Tech were also accredited by ACICS, an accreditor that had become notorious for approving bottom-of-the-barrel schools, willing to extend its approval easily and to look the other way when schools fell short.¹² In the case of these three schools alone, around 75,000 students were affected by the immediate closures.

In 2016, the Education Department conducted a regular review of ACICS, and career staff turned up dozens of areas of noncompliance, including evidence from those failed colleges. Based largely on those findings, NACIQI, an independent advisory body to the Department, recommended the Department withdraw the agency’s recognition. Remarkably, it did. The agency appealed the decision to the secretary in the waning days of the Obama administration, but the secretary reaffirmed the decision to withdraw recognition. This would have been a death knell to the poor-performing accreditor, so it bought time with a court fight, which paid off when President Trump came into office shortly after. Political appointees at the Department, citing the lawsuit, reversed the original decision.¹³ ACICS is back in full status as a gatekeeper today, albeit a shell of its former self, having lost dozens of colleges to other accreditors or to the catastrophic closures it failed to anticipate.¹⁴

But while ACICS had an unusual concentration of poor-quality institutions under its purview, the problems extend beyond ACICS. A chain of schools that included the Art Institutes and Argosy University, among other brands—accredited by agencies that included ACICS, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WSCUC)—nearly closed before being sold to a religious nonprofit called the Dream Center that had no experience or expertise in education. After sinking money into the schools for around two years, Dream Center executives ultimately filed for receivership and most campuses are now closed. But not before millions in federal aid went missing and students reported experiencing eviction and homelessness after the school apparently stole their federal aid dollars.

The circumstances around ACICS, as well as a burgeoning public debate on college closures and the efficacy of accreditors, reopened concerns about the failures of accreditors. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office stated that the majority of its round-table experts, including accreditors and other stakeholders, agreed that “inadequate accreditors’ standards are a challenge for overseeing academic quality and that accreditors lack effective oversight practices for academic quality.”¹⁵ The same year, the Department’s own inspector general found that the Department “does not have adequate controls” over the decision to recognize accreditors, and that the Department’s oversight of accreditors once they’re recognized “is not adequate to ensure agencies consistently and effectively carry out their responsibilities.”¹⁶

And it is about to get worse. Despite catastrophic and public failures that cost students years of their lives and billions of federal dollars, and repeated external findings that the accreditation leg of the triad is incredibly weak, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has recently sought to weaken, rather than strengthen, accreditation. A new rule, currently in the works, will vastly reduce the already-low expectations the Department has for its accreditors and its own oversight, and ensure that poor-quality colleges can continue to advertise themselves as accredited—and receive federal dollars—for years longer than they can today. The rules represent an even more significant back-tracking in accountability for accrediting agencies than the ban added during the Higher Education Act reauthorization in 2008 did, and all without Congressional input.

Despite widespread agreement that accreditation is not functioning as an effective gatekeeper to billions of dollars, there is less agreement about how to fix it. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chair of the powerful Senate HELP Committee, said at his 2015 accreditation hearing, “it’s important to find a way to make accreditation work better. I have had a hard time thinking of another way to do this….If the accreditors don’t do it, I can assure you the Congress can’t. And the Department of Education I don’t believe has the capacity or the know-how.” The game of hot potato continues.

Without change, accreditors will continue to fall short of our expectations and pay no consequence. The following recommendations, while not a full-scale re-envisioning, would help prevent future failures, ensure that accreditors are a strong part of the triad, and protect millions of students.

• Restore minimal oversight of accreditors through federal rules. Admittedly, requirements on accreditors have long been fairly lax. But a regulatory effort launched by the Trump administration in 2018 greatly weakened the requirements accreditors must place on the colleges they approve, as well as the Department’s own expectations for accreditors. Taken individually, the proposed changes will result in less oversight and provide a license for poor-quality colleges to flourish. Cumulatively, the changes are much more severe—likely to mean accreditors have neither the ability nor the inclination to ensure the quality of the institutions they approve, and that the Department has virtually no ability to police which accreditors are permitted to serve as gatekeepers to billions in federal dollars.¹⁷ Policymakers—at the Department and in Congress—must strengthen accreditation requirements by restoring strong federal rules before the triad collapses entirely.
  • Hold accreditors accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities. Accreditors have been designated by policy experts and media as “watchdogs that rarely bite.”¹⁸ The Government Accountability Office found that agencies sanctioned only about 8 percent of schools, and withdrew accreditation for only about 1 percent of accredited schools, despite there being more than 1,500 accredited colleges with graduation rates below 40 percent.¹⁹ Yet with millions of students dropping out of college every year, often indebted despite not holding a degree; a million borrowers defaulting for the first time on their loans each year; and little progress made to improve students’ outcomes over the years, it is clear that accreditors have fallen short of their responsibilities.²⁰ Some institutions are even able to obtain accreditation by shopping for the agency with the lowest standards; nowhere was this more obvious than with the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS). When ACICS-approved schools had to seek alternative accreditation after the agency (temporarily) lost its gatekeeper status, 111 schools were able to receive accreditation from another agency within 18 months, but fully 85 could not, and another 61 closed completely prior to the deadline.²¹ If standards for accreditors are not raised, very poor-quality institutions will persist.
  • Set reasonable time frames for improvement and require accreditors to take action when they expire. One straightforward improvement would be to require action when an institution has dragged the process out too long. Currently, federal rules require accreditors to pull their approval after an action for non-compliance (like probation) within a maximum of two years for a four-year college. In the 2018–19 rulemaking, the Department doubled that time frame. Combined with other changes that will allow accreditors to drag out the process of taking even an intermediate action in the first place, schools failing to meet accreditors’ standards could easily go a decade before they lose accreditation.²² The Department needs to restore and enforce those limits for accreditors, so that students know they can trust accreditors to pull approvals where warranted.
• Give accreditors enhanced tools for accountability. The loss of accreditation leaves most colleges unable to survive, given that it carries with it the loss of eligibility for federal financial aid. Accreditors are reluctant to use that bludgeon: they took around four times as many negative actions not to pull accreditation as they did to withdraw accreditation last year.²³ Encouraging accreditors to make use of limitations—ensuring colleges that fall short of the agency’s requirements cannot continue to expand their operations or enrollment, for instance, or mandating changes to increase spending on instruction—could help to protect students when agencies are unwilling to go as far as to remove approval. Accreditors also need legal protection from the institutions they accredit, so that when they take an action, they are not outgunned by lawyer fees and court battles.
• Make student outcomes central to what accreditors do and hold them to those standards. Accreditors—and particularly the regional accreditors that typically accredit public and nonprofit colleges—have a poor track record when it comes to ensuring student outcomes are prioritized at their colleges. Agencies often rely on vague, amorphous standards around student achievement and let colleges select their own metrics and set their own goals. Every agency has its own definition and data source.²⁴ And rarely, if ever, does a regional accreditor take severe action against a college on the basis of failing student achievement measures. The head of one such agency, when asked whether a college with a 10 percent graduation rate could do a good job, stated that “it can be a good school for those 10 percent who graduate.”²⁵ Congress should require that accreditors serving as gatekeepers to federal dollars set minimum requirements for their colleges in a variety of areas (such as graduation/retention rates and labor market outcomes); mandate that the Education Department provide applicable data to accreditors annually, so the data are comparable and reliable; and direct the Department to ensure agencies’ thresholds are reasonably effective.
• Ensure accreditors are student-focused in their policies and actions. Accreditors often boast of their “rigorous process of peer review,” in which they send hundreds of volunteer college faculty and administrators across the country to review the quality of other colleges. But while the peer review process may be a long-standing and valued one to promote “continuous improvement,” the high stakes of placing federal financial aid on the line carry the significant risk that peers don’t look too hard, or ask too much.
  • Create more independence within accrediting bodies. Accrediting agencies are currently required to have policies to prevent conflicts of interest. But those policies are not always sufficient to guard against such conflicts or affiliations. The Center for American Progress has found that, of 69 commission members designated to represent the “public,” nearly a third have backgrounds at colleges, mostly as retired faculty or administrators.²⁶ And in many agencies, most commissioners—those responsible for making decisions about accrediting actions—are employed at institutions approved by that same accreditor.²⁷ It is no wonder, then, that accreditors are often reluctant to hold institutions accountable. Peer review will not be an effective model if there is no degree of independence, particularly given the financial interests accreditors have in not withdrawing approval from an agency. Lawmakers should improve protections so they go beyond formal conflicts of interest and also prevent accreditors from stacking their commissions with current and former officials at the schools they review.
  • Increase transparency of accreditation documents. Much of the accreditation process happens in a black box, with reports and other materials usually kept private and students kept in the dark about the process that resulted in an institution earning and keeping its approval. During the 2008 debates, accreditors claimed opening up the process would “undermine their effectiveness,” making small and private colleges “reluctant to talk about their problems.”²⁸ And yet, one agency, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges headquartered in California, has decided to increase transparency, without apparent ramifications. The WSCUC website includes all final accreditation materials—like reports and decision letters—easily accessible to members of the public.²⁹ Policymakers should mandate that level of transparency across all accrediting agencies, as well as continued timely reporting to the Education Department (and the public) of key information and decision letters for negative actions taken by the agency.³⁰
  • Promote risk-based reviews of institutions and of accreditors. The accreditation process is often (rightly) critiqued as overly focused on compliance, and not focused enough on the types of issues that present the most severe problems. With a lengthy list of boxes to check, accreditors often spend too much time conducting regular reviews of quality institutions—and too little on the schools that underperform. Accreditors should be encouraged to focus on the colleges with the worst outcomes and the greatest risk for students. Similarly, the Department should invest more of its time in the accrediting agencies that fail students and taxpayers the most, or that leave taxpayers most at risk. More reviews of those agencies, and more focused reviews of all agencies when problems arise, would bring the greatest return on investment to the accreditation process.