College Accreditors Need Higher Standards

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/opinion/college-accreditors-need-higher-standards.html

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The federal government spends more than $180 billion a year to support higher education. But the system created by Congress to determine eligibility for federal dollars virtually guarantees that a portion of this money will be wasted by schools that have abysmally low standards, high dropout rates and, in many cases, saddle students with huge debt in exchange for useless degrees. Congress can remedy this problem by changing the way schools are accredited and by giving the Department of Education more say in the process.

Congress designed the accreditation system to shield colleges from undue interference by the Education Department; the responsibility for determining whether colleges are up to par is left to scores of independent organizations across the country. The department cannot directly require colleges to meet basic student achievement standards as a condition of receiving federal dollars. Incredibly, it also cannot dictate the standards or benchmarks by which these accrediting organizations judge whether a school is financially or academically sound.

The weakness in this hands-off approach was exposed when two of the nation’s largest for-profit college operations — Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute — were subjected to fraud investigations and eventually collapsed while under review by a prominent accrediting organization.

Taxpayers will foot the bill for hundreds of millions of dollars in student loans that will be forgiven for students who were defrauded by the schools or who were enrolled when their campuses shut down.

The culprit in both cases was the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, the nation’s largest accrediting body of for-profit schools. The Education Department is taking steps to shut the outfit down, but it’s late in doing so — Acics had been investigated for shoddy practices long before the Corinthian and ITT debacles.

In June, a study by the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group, uncovered 90 cases in which Acicshad given clean bills of health to for-profit schools that were already under state or federal investigation. According to the report, the president of a now-defunct Florida school whom the accreditor singled out for praise in 2011 was later convicted for stealing federal financial aid, enrolling ineligible students and fabricating high school diplomas.

Lax oversight is hardly unique to the for-profit sector. An investigation last year by The Wall Street Journal found that so-called watchdogs of higher education rarely take aggressive action. In a particularly striking example, the investigation found that about a dozen colleges had been given an accreditor’s seal of approval despite having graduation rates below 10 percent.

The system is clearly in need of repair. A bill pending in the Senate would be a start. It proposes several changes in the law, most important a provision that would require the Education Department to write standards dealing with graduation rates, job placement rates, loan repayment rates and other criteria that accrediting organizations would have to apply when evaluating colleges.

The bill would also force accreditors to respond more quickly to investigations and lawsuits alleging fraud by the schools, and to root out conflicts of interest that lead to cozy relations between accreditors and the schools they are supposed to oversee.