For a long time the federal government had very little role in higher education, other than famously giving states Western land rights in exchange for building public institutions that would train students in useful arts like agriculture, mining, etc., i.e. the land-grant universities that remain an important part of higher education today (Contrary to popular belief, the feds didn't grant the actual land on which the universities were built; rather revenue from the land rights financed the building. (Trivia: the University of the District Columbia is a land-grant university.))
That began to change after World War II with the G.I. Bill and even more importantly a huge influx of research dollars into higher education meant to build the nation's technological capacity and fight the Cold War. This had a profound impact on the character of the modern university, cementing research prowess as the over-riding determinant of prestige. The problem is that it happened at the exact same time that the nation's higher education system was expanding to accommodate huge numbers of new students as college-going became the norm. So we made universities care about one thing--research--even as we needed them to be good at another thing--teaching. This fundamental and on some level irreconcilable tension is the source of much of what's wrong with higher education today.
By the mid-60s the huge, powerful research universities were in their heyday. There was an expectation among many that federal support would expand from research to subsidizing the general operations of the universities themselves. But academic institutions didn't always turn out to be the best places to conduct research, and parts of the general public, along with conservative politicians, saw higher education as the source--both physical and ideological--of the dirty hippies who were allegedly tearing the nation apart.
So instead of giving money to institutions, Congress gave money directly to students, in the form of subsidized student loans and Pell grants, which are essentially higher education school vouchers (more on this later). This helped fuel an increasingly consumerist mindset among prospective college students, which in turn spawned things like aggressive college marketing and the U.S. News college rankings.
The people who created Pell grants weren't idiots. They realized that you can't just hand an 18-year-old thousands of dollars and let her spend it however she likes. Without some controls, nothing would prevent me from founding Kevin University in my home office, setting tuition at the exact amount of the Pell Grant, and handing out worthless diplomas to gullible and/or complicit lower-income students. So Congress set certain criteria for an institution to be eligible to receive money via Pell grants and subsidized loans. This provision (called "Title IV eligibility," after the relevant section of the Higher Education Act) is the primary leverage point used by Congress to make universities do what it wants, since most students now pay for college, in whole or in part, with some form of federal grant or loan.
One of the main criteria for Title IV eligibility is accreditation. But of course this still wasn't enough--otherwise I could create Kevin's Accreditation in my spare bedroom, accredit Kevin University, and then proceed to blow my ill-gotten Pell grant money at the track. So Congress directed the U.S. Department of Education to create a body that would essentially accredit accreditors. It's called the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, or NACIQI (pronounced nah-SEEK-eeh).
Accreditation has always been a mixed bag when it comes to quality control. The basic structure, for example, is confusing. In most respects "national" is better than "regional" in higher education--national universities are world-famous, while regional universities are where you go if you can't go somewhere better. In accreditation, it's the other way around: the country is split up among six regional accreditors, each with its own long-established territory, that provide the overall institutional accreditation that institutions need to be Title IV-eligible. Each regional accreditor goes about this in a somewhat different way. So if you read that a university is "nationally accredited" keep in mind that this is not as good as being regionally accredited. (There's also a whole separate system of program accreditation for things like schools of education, engineering, medicine, etc., but that's a topic for another day).
The current accreditation system works well in some ways. Accredited colleges are very unlikely to steal your money and take it to the track or hand you a worthless diploma from KevU. Accreditation brings certain standards in terms of faculty credentials, financial integrity, etc. Accreditation is based on peer review, so it gives institutions a good opportunity for self-reflection based on expert feedback, if they choose to take it.
But the peer-based nature of accreditation also limits its utility. There's a tendency toward log-rolling: you don't ask me hard questions, and I'll return the favor. Regulatory capture is a risk: accreditors can see institutions as their clients, not students or the public at large. Accreditors rely on institutional fees to run their operations, which means they often don't have the resources that evaluating something as complex as a university requires. More fundamentally, accreditation lives within the present values of higher education. And in that system, short-changing student learning in favor of research isn't a bug--it's a feature.
So when the Secretary Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education convened a few years ago and began asking some hard and perfectly valid questions about the fact that a lot of college students don't graduate or learn very much, the Department of Education responded by re-evaluating the role of accreditation. It appointed some new members to NASIQI who weren't inclined to just rubber-stamp approval, and it drafted new regulations which would require accreditors to require colleges to provide some kind of objective data indicating the extent to which they were successfully helping their students learn.
Naturally, the institutions and accreditors took to the challenge with vigor ran to Congress and had language inserted in the Higher Education Act to make such requirements illegal. This is what the recent flare-up is all about.
This seems to be a trend of late: (1) A regulatory agency charged with ensuring the quality of the nation's education system decides to create new public information about educational success. (2) The system responds by cutting off the process at its knees. That's what happened in New York when the teachers union pushed through dead-of-night legislation to prohibit the use of student performance data in evaluating teachers, and that's what's happening here.
What are the lessons in all of this? First, while it's easy enough to condemn government bureaucracies for focusing on bean-counting and process instead of bottom-line results, there are plenty of powerful organizations and interest groups out there that wouldn't have it any other way. They want bad government, because it frees them to act in their own interest, instead of the public interest.
Second, it hasn't been lost on school choice advocates that our higher education system, which is in many respects very successful, maintains a diverse mix of public and private providers who compete for what amount to post-secondary school vouchers. That's why President Bush re-labelled his latest voucher proposal as "Pell Grants for kids" in the State of the Union this year.
But from the beginning, it was obvious that you couldn't just hand college students a voucher and leave it at that. In any kind of choice-based education system, there has to be some kind of external quality control in addition to what market forces bring. Unlike cars, houses, and other expensive things, schools and universities are far too complicated for consumers to fairly evaluate on their own. They're also institutions that pursue fundamentally public interests, and thus need to be influenced by publicly-elected officials and organizations in a way that gives society more than what freely-acting consumers and providers would produce on their own.
Accreditation, properly regulated and designed, is one way to do that, and isn't wholly dissimilar from well-run charter school programs that are answerable to publicly-appointed boards. Either way, or any way, a smart combination of choice and public accountability is the best recipe for education, K-12 and higher alike.
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