How Higher Ed Protects Its Monopoly

Accreditation in higher education is an arcane subject. Some might even say a boring one. When I was editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, few reporters wanted to cover the issue.

Trustees I talk with seem oddly interested in accreditation. To them, it’s a risk. Lose accreditation, lose access to federal financial aid dollars. Unless you’re sitting on billions of dollars in endowment, you’ll be out of business in a few months, or maybe if you’re lucky, years. Of course, I always remind trustees that it’s hard to lose accreditation. College presidents, meanwhile, find accreditation a convenient scapegoat for everything they claim they want to do at their institution, but can’t.

What’s most interesting to me is that prospective students and their families rarely pay any attention to an institution’s accreditation—what’s necessary to access federal aid. If the topic crosses their mind at all during the college search, they’re drawn to a campus that markets its “specialized accreditation” for programs ranging from teacher education to landscape architecture to business schools. This type of accreditation is not required—and although it’s advertised as a way for students to find “high-quality programs”—the requirements that schools need to meet to get specialized accreditation aren’t always clear to the end consumer.

Lately, accreditation has been in the news because two of the leading contenders for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination want to ditch the current system. In announcing his presidential bid in May, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called accrediting agencies “cartels.” Former president Donald Trump a few weeks earlier said he’d “fire” the existing accreditors and create new ones to reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.”

How accreditors came to be the de-facto overseer for hundreds of billions of dollars of student aid was seemingly an accident of history.

When Congress passed the Higher Education Act in the 1960s, new streams of federal dollars from the law could only go to students who attended institutions approved by a “recognized” accreditor.

Accreditors were already evaluating colleges, so they raised their hand to do the job. Higher ed leaders favored this solution because accreditors were membership organizations that they themselves governed. It’s kind of like the fox guarding the hen house—much better than having the federal government take on the role.

This is the history as told to me and Michael Horn on a recent episode of our podcast, Future U. Our guest was Barbara Brittingham. Brittingham is the former president of the New England Commission on Higher Education, also known as NECHE, which accredits more than 200 colleges and universities in the six New England states and 11 American-style institutions abroad.

Brittingham guided me and Michael through how accreditors actually operate and why. Three key takeaways for me from our conversation:

1. Accreditation is about really self-improvement. We tend to think of accreditors as the auditors or the police—in other words, as overseers. But a big piece of the accreditation process is the “self-study,” where colleges turn a mirror on themselves. “The accreditor wants to know that the institution or the program can be honest with itself,” Brittingham told us. “At some level, it’s proof exercise: you have to convince people that you meet the standards.”
2. Accreditation in the U.S. is different than much of the rest of the world. In many other countries, accreditation is largely carried out by the government because they also directly allocate public dollars to institutions. In the U.S., the federal government sets general standards for the regional accreditors, but it’s up to them to decide how to apply those standards on institutions.
3. Transparency is not a standard. One of the things about accreditation that frustrates me is how opaque much of the process is. Prospective students should be able to easily access information collected about institutions—what they’re doing well, what they need to improve on, and increasingly their financial sustainability.

Brittingham told us that accreditation has “evolved.” She pointed out that NECHE traces its roots back to 1885, when one of its standards was that colleges needed 8,000 books in the library (although it was silent on whether students had to use the books). Later, accreditors started to examine how students used the books, and more recently, there has been a focus on “outcome” standards—do students know how to find, evaluate, and use information, for example.

Sure, accreditation has evolved, but the question is whether it’s evolving fast enough.

Accreditors play a key role in ensuring quality, but in doing so there is tension between innovation and the status quo. When the people running institutions are also the people in essence regulating them, there tends to be a bias toward protecting the status quo—especially when the industry feels threatened as it does now.

Case in point: I recently hosted a salon dinner in Boston for some college and university leaders and the topic of the three-year degree came up. Some institutions want to offer one, but there is hesitation to approve a three-year bachelor’s degree among the college presidents who serve on the NECHE board. They say it’s because a bachelor’s degree should be four years. But they also know that if one institution were to offer a three-year degree it might put even more pressure on their own institutions to follow—and their business models are built for four years.

One reason NECHE was started, Brittingham said, was to better delineate between high schools and colleges and the standards for each. With three-year degrees, competency-based education, dual-enrollment in high schools, those lines are increasingly blurring. Given the high cost of college and the need for upskilling and reskilling throughout life, we need to think differently about legacy credentials—and how they are earned—that have dictated so much of higher education for so long.

Firing accreditors or allowing institutions to accreditation shop outside of their regions (Florida now has legislation on the books that requires institutions to change accreditors at the end of each accreditation cycle) won’t solve this problem. But the federal government needs to hold accreditors more accountable for whether they are really protecting quality and consumers or whether they are just protecting the survival of their own institutions.

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