"Nobody can kill an institution of higher education"

[Pangloss]

Even when they need to. Fascinating op/ed piece in Washington Monthly about the failures of the modern regional accreditation system in the US and the sad story of Southeastern University, a small school in Washington, D.C. The accreditation issue has come up in the national spotlight recently following the Obama administration's Education department's demands for regional accreditation bodies to toughen up their standards.

 

The only reservation I have about this piece is that it doesn't mention the simple fact that Federal student loans are also available to a whole body of schools with a far LOWER standard of practice -- national accreditors. These bodies represent fly-by-night, shopping-mall-storefront schools that don't even TRY to maintain the appearance of propriety, but are just as capable of reaping the guaranteed-profit windfall of Federal student loans.

 

So the author should be careful what he wishes for, but that doesn't reduce the impact of what he's saying. The situation is pretty depressing, but some of his suggestions for improvement were interesting. One of the legitimate complaints from the "school" side is that failure represents a total loss of the entire institution, which is too harsh. But if the system were better at monitoring and intervention then it could catch problems before they become that severe, and correct them, thereby preventing exactly that fear from coming true.

 

I've seen this process first hand, sitting through both accreditation review meetings with representatives from the regional body, and prep sessions where I was told what to say and how to say it (as well as after-meeting debriefs). It's quite a show, and really about the best thing you can say about it is that it's better than nothing. The process itself is so tedious and time-consuming that it does seem to push less-motivated frauds away to faster money-making schemes.

 

Here's an interesting quote that pretty much sums up the story:

 

How the accreditors have failed is easy enough to understand. Commissions like Middle States have no actual regulatory authority and only one tool—de-accreditation—to compel compliance by delinquent schools. Once the federal government handed accreditors the keys to the financial aid kingdom, de-accreditation amounted to a financial death penalty, a sentence that accreditors, who are primarily made up of current and former university officials, are loath to administer. As a result, accreditors rarely step in before universities are already beyond redemption; they often end up doing little more than standing next to the financial abyss and giving the occasional bankrupt institution a nudge on its way over the cliff. This happens so rarely that when I spoke with Jarvis recently, she seemed surprised that Middle States had brought down the hammer on Southeastern at all. "The accreditors used to say, ‘We’re your colleagues, we’re here to help you,’" she said. "They’re becoming regulators now." Emilia Butu, a former professor of computer science at Southeastern, told me, "I had a colleague who had worked at Southeastern for over thirty years, and she told me there were times in the 1980s and 1990s when the university was actually in much worse shape than it was in 2009 when Middle States finally revoked accreditation. She liked to quote one of the former Southeastern presidents, who said, ‘Nobody can kill an institution of higher education.’"

 

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1003.carey.html

[john5746]

"Nobody can kill an institution of higher education"

 

They can commit suicide

[Pangloss]

Indeed.