Quotes I Wish I Had Two Months Ago

by Andrew Gillen

These quotes from this paper by Staci Provezis would have been great to have for our recent study on accreditation.

What is driving the assessment movement in American higher education?... Regional accreditation is among the most important of those forces. Chief academic officers at regionally accredited institutions across the U.S. cite accreditation as the primary reason their institutions assess student learning...

Douglas Bennett, president of Earlham College, said, "If we are going to stand behind accreditation as our quality assurance mechanism, we cannot hide that information; we have to make it available.”...

Each of the regional accreditors… appears to view outcomes assessment as a work-in-progress, treating assessment more as a means to improvement than as a narrowly defined approach to quality control and accountability.

More Evidence that We Need New System of Quality Control

by Daniel L. Bennett

Recently, I piggy-backed off excellent reporting by Education Sector's Ben Miller and commentary from Kevin Carey that described the public Chicago State University as one of the nation's growing number of drop-out factories and a non-trivial source of financial impropriety:

state audit found that even as the university suffered budget cuts, [Elnora] Daniel [former President] and other employees had spent lavishly on meals, alcohol, and first-class airfare. Daniel had brought five relatives and a university administrator with her on a nine-day Caribbean cruise for a “leadership conference.” Lax financial oversight allegedly resulted in the university paying more than a quarter of a million dollars for two photocopiers purchased from a company owned by a university employee.

Meanwhile, students contended with broken elevators, dirty classrooms, and ill-equipped labs. As enrollment declined, so did graduation rates. Of the first-time, full-time freshmen who started in 1996, about 18 percent graduated within six years.

Carey described situation at CSU as also being one of gross incompetence that will likely go unchecked:

Because colleges and universities are unusually well-regarded institutions that serve a noble societal purpose and are run by people with esteemed academic credentials, the public conversation about them tends to discount the possibility of gross incompetence. In reality, universities can be terribly mismanaged just like K-12 schools, fire departments, or huge multinational oil companies. Failure to acknowledge this prevents us from tackling the problems that most need to be solved.

Now the Chicago Tribune reports that Carey's prophesy was correct:

Chicago State University's accreditation has been reaffirmed after being in limbo for more than a year due to concerns about poor retention and graduation rates.

This provides more fuel to the fire that our nation's quality control system is seriously flawed and in dire need of real reform. Now, I obviously need to learn much more about CSU's history to be in a position to make a judgement as to whether it should be eligible for federal aid, but it seems common sense that its accreditation status should not be simply reaffirmed because it has:

started several new programs to help students who are struggling. Among them: an early alert system that every month flags students who are missing class, not turning in homework or failing exams. Tutoring is then offered to those students.

The library is now open until midnight, and the university purchased textbooks that are kept at the library for students who can't afford their own. The university also worked with the Chicago Transit Authority to add a bus stop on campus.

In other words, the poorly performing school is being awarded for spending more money. At best, the school should be given a short-term probationary status with some goals that must be reached in order to retain accreditation. What I'm saying is that our accreditation system has no teeth. It is afraid to make any tough decisions due at least partially to the fact that it is a self-regulated collegial system. CCAP has been exploring accreditation reform recently and will be releasing a paper in the near future that includes our recommendations for a better quality control system of higher education. Stay tuned.

"Time for a Revolution" - Fully Embracing Technology

By John Glaser

Charles Huckabee at the Chronicle reports:

Dana College, a small, financially struggling institution in Nebraska that had sought a path back to solvency through a sale to private investors, announced on Wednesday that the sale would not proceed and that the college would close because its accreditation would not transfer to the potential new owners.

The investor group that had formed to buy the college, an entity called Dana Education Corporation, had said in March that it planned to maintain a residential campus but also offer online courses. The college's accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, cited the planned online courses among its reasons for denying the institution's request for its accreditation to continue after a change of control.

Although it's true that there were other factors the Higher Learning Commission considered that led it to deny accreditation to Dana College, this should not have been one of them. How could the criteria for denying accreditation include the use of the world's most revolutionary tool for learning? Speaking of revolutionary, Katie Ash at Education Week reported on a recent speech by Jeff Piontek, the head of school at the Hawaii Technology Academy. He has quite a different perspective on the role of technology and the internet in education:

"It's time for a revolution in education."

"It's creativity and innovation that's going to drive our economy," said Piontek, criticizing the standardized tests that he said stifled learning and creativity in public schools across the country. Standardized tests "are not a true gauge of student learning," he said. "We need to think about how we actually assess students on a larger scale."

Educators must give students the technological tools and resources they need to become competent global citizens, said Piontek. Teachers must learn to guide students with content and curriculum and trust that the students will know how to use the tools, he said. "When you're in a classroom, you have to know that the culture you're teaching is not your own," he said, referring to the gap between those who have grown up using digital tools and those who have not.

The generational gap that exists among people who didn't grow up with personal computers and the internet and those who did is a strain on how our institutions operate. Although I believe it is a quickly waning phenomenon, those older generations, who are now heading our schools and universities etc., tend to be skeptical of just how useful and revolutionary these tools can be for the betterment of education. They have brought unprecedented efficiencies in all kinds of markets and aspects of daily life, why not in learning?

Despite the ever-rising costs of higher education, colleges are relying on enormous amounts of subsidies, grants, and endowments to cover their costs. How might technology and the internet mitigate these concerns if it were more fully embraced? We know, at least, that Dana College might still be open next year.

Update: Check out Katherine Mangu-Ward over at Reason, in a post entitled "1 in 4 Kids Now Learning Online, Only 4 Percent of Teachers Meeting Them There".

Bishirjian's Lament

By Richard Vedder

Dick Bishirjian is an unusual university president. He is blunt, outspoken, not afraid of controversy, and no doubt offensive to some precisely because he does not speak the diplomatic, politically correct blather than emanates so predictably from the mouths of university leaders. I like him a lot. He runs a for-profit online school, Yorktown University, and is constantly fighting for the right to operate.

Lately, Dick's emails have centered on his trials and tribulations before the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), the university accrediting arm of the largest of the regional accreditors, the North Central Association. As I understand it, the HLC is threatening to sanction accredited schools that cannot demonstrate that they have licenses to operate in every state in which they have students. Thus a small online school like Yorktown, with perhaps students in 10-15 states under HLC jurisdiction, may have to hire lawyers, etc., to file paperwork in all of those states in order to do business. Another great higher education entrepreneur, Randy Best, once told me that barriers to entry imposed by regulations (e.g., accreditation) was one of the single largest obstacles to offering truly low cost quality college education in America. I thought Randy was exaggerating a bit, but after reading Dick's laments I am coming to realize that he is right on target.

It is all ridiculous. It is bad enough that we have seven regional accreditors instead of one national one, and the operating rules in, say, California or Florida probably differ from those in Illinois. It is worse that the cost of acquiring accreditation is a serious barrier to entry for modestly capitalized firms, some of which have interesting and innovative curricular concepts. But now to think that state governments can add their costly and educationally meaningless barriers on top of all that is particularly infuriating.

What to do? I think people like Dick should ban together with a good public interest law firm like the Institute for Justice and challenge this type of regulation on constitutional grounds --a violation of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S.Constitution. As Dick points out, the FTC has told states they cannot regulate internet sales of eyeware products, presumably on those constitutional grounds. Courts have looked with disfavor on attempts of states to forbid interstate importation of liquor. It is time to challenge this type of regulation.

Meeting recently with the CEO of one of the nation's largest for-profit providers, I was told that accreditation on balance has little impact --its costs are offset by its benefits, providing sort of a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" to reliable and reputable deliverers of higher education services. The big guys, though, can endure spending a few million dollars to overcome the duplication inanities of the bureaucrats. This gives them an unfair advantage over the Dick Bishirjian's of the world, who are trying to obtain the scale of operation that makes internet-based higher education profitable. Let's level the playing field.

Letter to the Secretary of Education on Credit Transfer Policy

WASHINGTON, DC (March 1, 2010)—Today, five leading higher education experts sent the following letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urging him to address the problem of restrictive transfer policies with a view to increasing graduation rates. The signatories are Kevin Carey, Policy Director at Education Sector; Frederick M. Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; Anne D. Neal, President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni; Mark Schneider, Vice President at the American Institutes for Research; and Richard Vedder, Director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. The letter reads:

The Obama Administration has outlined its desire to promote student success in postsecondary education and to increase the number of students with postsecondary degrees. Currently, less than 60% of students nation-wide graduate in six years.

While there are no doubt many reasons for this low graduation rate, evidence suggests that problems in transferring credits may be a significant underlying cause. According to a recent report by the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, “a 1999 CHEA survey of college catalogs found that 28 percent of regionally accredited institutions contained language that transfer requests would be considered only from institutions that were regionally accredited. Another 10 percent contained language that transfer requests from institutions that are reviewed by national faith-related or national career-related accreditors would be considered, but that regional accreditation would be preferred.”

In a world where nearly 60 percent of college students can be expected to earn credits from more than one institution of higher learning, the institutional practice of privileging certain kinds of federally-recognized accreditors over others cannot continue. The students who are hurt most by difficulties in transfer are those with the least amount of advising, the least amount of money to spend. This is unconscionable.

A student’s inability to transfer credit may result in longer enrollment, extended tuition payments, and additional federal financial aid—at considerable cost to the student and the American taxpayer. And simply having institutions publish their credit transfer policies, as now required by the 2008 Higher Education Act reauthorization, is not enough.

Notably, the Higher Education Amendments Act of 1998 mandated the Education Department to conduct a study evaluating policies or practices instituted by recognized accrediting agencies regarding the treatment of the transfer of credits from one institution of higher education to another. The Department explored methodologies but never completed a formal study.

The General Accounting Office did, in fact, conduct a study in October 2005, concluding that postsecondary institutions could promote more consistent consideration of coursework by not basing determinations on accreditation. However, it concluded that data were not available on the number of credits that do not transfer, making it impossible to assess the actual costs associated with nontransferable credits—on the students or the federal government.

If we expect to improve student success, it is time to examine the process by which sending and receiving institutions manage the transfer function to ensure an easier and less costly progression by students. A credible study of the costs of restrictive transfer policies remains badly needed. With multiple providers and multiple modes of delivering higher education, it is essential that policies be in place that ensure students do not waste time—or taxpayer dollars—in obtaining postsecondary education.

As the Obama Administration turns its attention to increasing the number of students receiving college degrees, we believe a critical concern should be assuring a seamless transfer process. We respectfully request that you authorize the Department to undertake a high-priority and thorough study documenting the extent of the problem and identifying conditions and interventions that advance student success.

Please note that institutional affiliations of signatories are provided for identification purposes only; the views expressed are theirs alone. For more information on the signatories, visit their respective websites: Kevin Carey of Education Sector (www.educationsector.org); Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (www.aei.org); Anne D. Neal of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (www.goacta.org); Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research (www.air.org); Richard Vedder of The Center for College Affordability and Productivity (www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org).

The Gospel According to St. Bob

By Richard Vedder

Colleges can obtain money to meet new needs in two ways. First, they can go out and raise new funds. Second, they can reallocate existing funds --reduce funding for some activities to expand or initiate programs.

College presidents enjoy (or at least accept) raising new money. They have become good at begging legislatures, private donors and others for funds. Moreover, if that does not do the job (as is usually the case), it is relatively easy to pass the buck (or actually take the buck) from students in the form of tuition hikes. It is this approach that has brought about higher education cost escalation.

College presidents dislike having to reallocate funds, because that makes people on campus mad --really mad. Tenured faculty are kept happy by giving them $$ for new programs, lighter teaching loads, higher salaries, etc., but they are ready to go to war if their programs are reduced. The same is true, perhaps to a lesser degree, with other members of the campus community --alums, administrators, even students. As Howard Bowen said a few decades ago, colleges will spend whatever that have --the marginal propensity to consume out of income always is roughly one (to use old Keynesian lingo).

Along comes Bob Dickeson. Bob is one of my favorites. He has done it all --at a young age, he was a high level university administrator, including serving as President of the University of Northern Colorado for a decade. He was CEO of a major company supplying higher education services --Noel-Levitz. He worked closely with a couple of governors on their staffs. He helped start the Lumina Foundation where he worked as a senior executive for many years. He did some great, straight talking studies for the Spellings Commission, ones that angered the Establishment, which meant they were excellent. His study on accreditation nearly caused a few heart attacks, but was right on the money in terms of identifying a real problem.
Getting to know Bob while on that Commission was a real treat.

Bob has revised his book with the boring title of Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services, first written a decade ago. It is must
reading for all who have the ability to change universities, and especially university presidents, provosts, and trustees. Bob sent me a copy, and I have devoured it. He gets into the nitty-gritty of how reallocating resources should be done at universities, starting with identifying institutional missions (usually done excesssively vaguely and in a manner that gives little clue as to the institution's true direction), the key players in making change happen, the questions that need to be asked and answered in reallocation, etc., etc.

Bob's book is a little wonkish, a little narrow in its scope, but that is what makes it both good and relevant. Today, colleges are being forced into reallocation mode, and cross the board budget cuts are sometimes politically the least unpopular but always the least desirable way to proceed. Should we reduce the sociology department by eliminating its moribund master's program in order to increase research efforts in nano science? Should we out source more activities? Bob gives guidance how to proceed in answering questions like these. More people should read Bob Dickeson, and then call him in Estes Park, Colorado (his home) if more guidance is needed.

Links for 2/11/10

Al Roth

Robert Townsend of the American Historical Association … “The primary problem today, as it was a decade ago, seems to lie on the supply side of the market—in the number of doctoral students being trained, and in the skills and expectations those students develop in the course of their training."

For a dissenting view on this latter paragraph, see Marc Bosquet's column: At the AHA: Huh?

Bosquet, the author of How the University Works (here is the introductory chapter) advocates more stringent licensing of who can teach history to undergraduates, to increase the demand for Ph.D.s in full time positions, by displacing graduate student teaching fellows and part time faculty.

As an economist, I was struck by several things about Bosquet's book, the first of which was in the foreword by AAUP president Cary Nelson. Nelson speaks of the need for theory to help understand the situation of university employees… He then enumerates the failure to do so of "Every body of theory with broad implications for understanding our own practices...", naming each such body of theory in turn "Psychoanalytic criticism...Marxist theory...feminist theory," concluding "The one institutional site where one might have hoped for a theorized account of the job system was the Modern Language Association."

It's humbling (and perhaps illuminating) to note that nowhere do these scholars look to economics for a theory of employment...

Thomas H. Benton

she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap…

Scenarios like that are what irritate me about professors who still bleat on about "the life of mind." They absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, "there are no guarantees." But that phrase suggests there's only a chance you won't get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will…

The main point of another column I wrote six years ago ("If You Must Go") is that students considering graduate school should "do their homework." But the problem is that there is still almost no way—apart from the rumor mill to which they do not really have access—for students to gather some of the most crucial information about graduate programs: the rate of attrition, the average amount of debt at graduation, and, most important, the placement of graduates (differentiating between adjunct, lecturer, visiting, tenure-track positions, and nonacademic positions). Programs often claim that graduates who are working as adjuncts or visiting faculty members are successfully placed in the profession.

Most departments will never willingly provide that information because it is radically against their interest to do so. I can see no way for that information to become available unless it becomes part of accreditation or rankings in publications such as U.S. News and World Report.

Tim Ranzetta on Nevada’s prepaid tuition plan.

“Fund balance is estimated to have a 51% probability of being adequate to satisfy all Program obligations."

A 51% probability? I don't like those odds for a non-guaranteed financial product where I could get less back than I put in. What makes that 51% figure even more interesting is the fact that it is based on projected investment returns of 7.5% for a fund invested 55% in equity and 45% in fixed income…

Isn't it time that someone took a closer look at protecting consumers from these risky financial products that inadequately disclose their risks?

Jennifer Epstein

University of California students… spent a little more than 28 hours each week combined on class and homework…

Another New Idea for Higher Education

By Richard Vedder

When I was on the Spellings Commission, someone, I believe Charlie Reed who runs the Cal State University system, said we should concentrate on coming up with two or three "big ideas" and not sweat the small stuff. I think Charlie was right then, and now as well. Higher education is in need of a paradigm shift, meaning bold new ways of doing things.

Talking to one of the most prominent entrepreneurs in the for profit (market driven) segment of higher education, we both mused about an idea that we independently had come up with. Why not let students take courses from any numbers of independent producers of courses and than new companies come along and package the material together in a degree program? The packager ("university") would assure that the courses meet quality control standards, that there is a coherence to the curriculum, that certain minimum standards are met --e.g., an econ major must include 10 or 12 courses with both basic and intermediate levels of economic theory and some narrower courses, etc. The packager would seek accreditation. If accreditators bulk at this approach, the time has come to get rid of the accreditors. A student could take English from the U of Phoenix, math from Strayer U, sociology (if it must be taken) from Kaplan Higher Ed, philosophy from Western Governors U, etc. Or maybe the packager would use a bunch of new smaller providers who specialize in a single discipline. Individual faculty or small groups could sell their services to the packager and work as individual contractors from home.

A large part of work could be provided for free or near free and the packager would certify that the student had mastered knowledge of the subject -- a variation on the Wikipedia University concept. Indeed, for a low price, say $10 million, the Feds could have say 200 vital courses developed --for $50 million you could have 400 courses developed at a high level of quality that any packager of degrees could use in dealing with students. This would allow low cost bachelor's degrees to be taught which emphasise the basics in the major disciplines and not the anti-intellectual fad courses often taught today to attract students or appeal to spoiled faculty members. A good solid degree could be made available at a relatively low cost for those considering college strictly as an investment good and not as an opportunity for socialization.

My idea du jour. I am willing to invest personally in the concept if the right persons are doing it and the government does not try to stifle this innovation --which they might if the higher ed establishment tries to stop it, which I believe it would.

Death to Accreditators?

By Richard Vedder

Judith Eaton, Mother Superior of the accrediting agencies in America (head of the Council of Higher Education Accreditation) probably breathed a sigh of relief when Margaret Spellings, Sara Tucker and others packed their bags at the end of the Bush Administration. The era of intense scrutiny of accreditation was, it was hoped, over. In fact, the opposite has occurred: the accrediting folks are on the ropes, reeling from multiple attacks from an increasingly activist Department of Education.

The latest incident is the Inspector General of the Department of Education's blistering attack on the North Central Association, the largest of the nation's comprehensive regional accrediting agencies. It seems the North Central's Higher Education Commission accredited a for profit institution without qualification, when it knew full well there were serious questions regarding the rewarding of credit. The IG thinks the North Central unit should be put out of the accreditation business.

I know nothing about the current dispute, and find it a bit odd that the Inspector General is reviewing accreditation decisions of individual institutions. But I have been noting for years that for all the expense, accreditation does very little --rarely putting an institution out of business for poor performance. I have lamented the fact that the accreditors are governed by the universities that are accredited, to me a grievous conflict of interest. I have complained that accreditation costs have been a significant barrier to entry for several entrepreneurial for-profit institutions that it appeared to me should be allowed to operate. Also, some accrediting agencies (notably the despicable American Bar Association) have used racist and other un-American criteria rather than academic standards as a prime determinant of accrediting criteria.

In a world where there were good data on student performance in college, on what faculties do, on the nature of research, etc., we simply would not need accreditation. General Motors did not get into trouble because it was going to lose its accreditation, but rather it got into trouble because people stopped buying its cars. Markets can and do perform a role, and more effectively, than accreditation does. To be sure, given the dubious presence of federal monies in higher education, probably there is some minimum threshold level below which federal monies should not be dispensed to institutions or their students. But that can be accomplished by a small federal agency that reviews data from the thousands of colleges and decides which ones are outside the parameters of acceptability. Since the colleges do not collect or report much worthwhile data on performance, it is impossible to use this approach. Margaret Spellings and Sara Tucker were right in their attempt to force colleges to provide some performance measures as a condition for accreditation, but the colleges ran to their favorite congressional puppet, Senator Lamar Alexander (sometime university president) and got Congress to block the attempt to require accountability.

Good luck to Arne Duncan's crew as it takes on the accreditors. Prediction: they will be as unsuccessful in the final analysis as the Spellings/Tucker crew, but they at least might scare the colleges into a modicum of responsible behavior.

Why So Much Secrecy With All Things Accreditation?

by Andrew Gillen

Today’s papers bring a story that could only happen with accreditation. For those of you unfamiliar with accreditation, the federal government didn’t trust itself to regulate institutions of higher education, so it allows accrediting bodies to act as the gatekeepers to federal money. If a college wants its students to have access to federal financial aid money, it has to satisfy the accreditors that it knows what it’s doing when it comes to providing an education. It’s a reasonable approach in theory, but the implementation is entirely screwed up.

One of the main problems is that everything is kept a secret. For instance, one very important question concerning higher ed is how much value they add (as opposed to just performing a signaling/screening function). Several weeks ago, I heard Judith Eaton, president of CHEA, the accreditors group say “Our research shows that there is value added.” This is great news. Where can you find the studies showing all this value added? You can’t, because the accreditors keep them secret.

Other methods of addressing the issue, such as NSSE and CLA, also keep their results secret, but this is because they are voluntary. If they didn’t agree to keep them secret, no schools would participate. Accreditation is different – there is no need to keep the results secret because the schools are required to participate. Keeping the results secret serves no beneficial purpose.

All this secrecy is why today’s stories are not that surprising.

Doug Lederman

the Education Department's inspector general issued a stinging rebuke Thursday of the country's largest regional accreditor and urged department officials to consider terminating the agency's authority…

Exactly what issues that the Higher Learning Commission found (and that the inspector general accuses it of underemphasizing) is impossible to tell from the heavily redacted eight-page memo that the inspector general published…

Eric Kelderman

News of the report also sent shock waves through the for-profit higher-education sector. Nearly all of the major for-profit companies whose institutions seek regional accreditation do so through the Higher Learning Commission, and all of them, like American InterContinental, operate extensive distance-learning programs…

It "suggests a whole new level of hostility on the part of OIG to what and how the for-profit schools operate, particularly online,"

Is the government simply ensuring that accreditors are doing their job, or are they trying to scare them away from accrediting evil for profits? It’s easy to adopt a conspiratorial mindset and [potentially] read too much into these types of things when everything is kept secret.

Secrecy is the enemy. The excessive reliance on secrecy with all things accreditation translates into the following:

1. The accreditors approach to regulating colleges: trust us, we’re experts
2. The government’s approach to regulating accreditors: trust us, we’re experts

This would be great, except for the fact that our friends over at CAP, New America, and Education Sector detail the reasons we shouldn’t trust private entities, especially for profit ones, and our friends over at Heritage, AEI, and Cato detail the reasons we shouldn’t trust the government.

Perhaps we'd be better off if we eliminated all this secrecy so that we could fulfill the latter part of that old slogan: trust, but verify.

Federal Accreditation is Not the Answer

by Peter Neiger

Few people with any knowledge on the subject would say that the current higher education accreditation system is flawless. It is a system filled with abuses, secrecy and is a lethargic process that rarely protects students from failing universities. This is the same problem that you will always find when a private entity is given a virtual government monopoly over an industry. We see the same thing in the current health-care debacle where private insurance companies are exempt from anti-trust laws and allowed to corner the market in a geographic region.

It seems that the joint public-private system is unsustainable and many people have proposed moving towards a federal public system run by and monitored by the government. Unfortunately, this is not a viable solution and would create a different set of problems for the system in which the needs of the consumers of higher education - students and the tax-payers - would be neglected. A potential national accreditation system suffers from two potential problems: industry capture and a status quo bias.

When a government agency works to set the requirements for an industry that it seeks to regulate, it must turn to “professionals” in that industry. In all likelihood, a national accreditation system would turn to the very universities that it is monitoring for information on what to require. These lobbyists would continue to call for vague requirements that are not based on value-creation, but on the convenience of the universities. The education industry will capture the accreditation system to a greater extent than it already has. Just look to the U.S. Department of Agriculture that was created to regulate farming and now acts as an advocate for farmers. The needs of the special interests will be placed ahead of the general public.

There is also the strong possibility of a bias towards the status-quo and a low tolerance for change. Transparency is important to politics so the elected officials and bureaucrats will lean towards the status quo. Nobody wants to be the one in charge when a school is failing, it is much easier to either ignore the problem and pass it on to someone else or fight against any disruption of the system. The FDA is a prime example; in order to make sure that their political careers advance, the employees of the FDA are overly cautious. This overly-cautious nature brings drugs that could save lives to market too slowly. Government regulation of accreditation will have the same effect, it will only work to further hold back innovation and reduce the competitiveness of Americans on the global market.

The status quo is unsustainable, but nationalization is not the answer. A government run accreditation system will bring about all the negative aspects of the current system, possibly add a few more, and bring no solutions. This system will continue to restrict entrance into the higher education industry, do nothing to improve quality or lower costs, and cost the tax-payers bundles of money for another government bureaucracy.