Coming Soon: The Death Of Accreditation - Part 1

Many in higher education and particularly the for-profit sector were expecting the worst from the Department of Education as it handed down its final so-called gainful employment regulations. While far from ideal, several for-profit leaders I have spoken with are just thankful that the final rules were not as severe as they could have been.

From my vantage point, gainful employment regulations, no matter how flexible they might be, highlight a dangerous trend in American higher education- the slow and painful death of our system of accreditation. More so, there is only one real alternative to accreditation - a United States Ministry of Education. This is what really keeps me up at night!

The new regulations DOE has implemented over the past two years, rules that regulate how credit hours should be defined, subject schools to regulations of every state government outside of the jurisdiction a school has locations, and gainful employment are harmful and unprecedented intrusions. These regulations threaten institutional autonomy and our system of accreditation that is envied around the world. They also compromise America's leadership position in higher education as well as quality, innovation, and access.

With each entry into the Federal Register, DOE has put rules in place that undermine accreditation agency roles and challenge long-sacred institutional independence from government. Washington can now indirectly influence which programs schools offer, program design, instructional methods, curriculum, academic standards, where schools can recruit certain students from, and even the setting of tuition rates!

While several administrators at private not-for-profit and public institutions point out that these new regulations were enacted to restrict the activities of certain bad actors in the for-profit sector, these regulations impact all institutions. They can be applied and expanded to further usurp institutional autonomy and our system of accreditation at anytime.

As the United States moves forward on the ill-fated path toward the establishment of a quasi Ministry of Education, our international counterparts are moving in droves away from public regulatory models and to a more American system of accreditation. One of the most extreme examples of contemporary government regulation can be found in France, which Chevalillier (1998) asserts was considered to be the most centralized and bureaucratic system in the Western world.

Although there have been notable reforms in France since the late 1980s, their Ministry of Education still provides weekly directives to institutional administrators which include instructions on every aspect of the life and work of their institutions. Due to years of extensive centralized regulation, even with greater autonomy, many French institutions lack dynamic and progressive leadership, coherent strategic planning, and innovating as the result of an engrained culture of dependency on regulatory direction (Chevaillier, 1998).

Even proponents of public regulation acknowledge that institutions in countries with extensive regulation lack the prestige and excellence of schools that are found in the United States. Researchers, Jacobs and Van Der Ploeg (2006) found that top European students and academics flock to universities in the United States and that continental Europe, which has historically maintained extensive public regulatory structures over higher education, has only a handful of top-ranked post-secondary institutions compared to the United States.

Public regulation typically includes not only government-run accreditation organizations but can also include academic audits, performance based funding, national assessment examinations, and national standards (Dill, 2007). In many cases, however, a traditional public regulatory scenario includes significant government intervention that can include a centralized ministry of education hiring/appointing institutional administrators, interfering in instructional matters, and directly or indirectly managing day-to-day operations at the institutional level (Musselin, 1997).