In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Barbara Brittingham, chair of the Council of Regional Accreditation Commissions, takes issue with my recent report on accreditation commissioners’ conflicts of interest. My report, which was profiled in the Journal two weeks ago, found that two-thirds of accreditation commissioners are employed at schools which they oversee. As accreditors are the gatekeepers of federal student aid, this creates a serious conflict of interest.
Brittingham argues that such conflicts of interest are irrelevant due to safeguards accreditation agencies already have in place. Usually, commissioners are required to recuse themselves from deliberations regarding an institution in which they have an interest. However, these safeguards are insufficient—besides voting directly on the accreditation of a single institution, there are several other ways a commissioner can influence the accreditation process.
First, accreditors’ conflict of interest policies do not address—and perhaps cannot address—the possibility of logrolling. Logrolling occurs when members of a decision-making body, such as an accreditation commission, trade votes advancing one another’s priorities. In the case of accreditors, commissioners may cast favorable votes towards their peers’ institutions in exchange for implicit promises of favorable votes towards their own.
Logrolling is as old as democracy, and is present in most decision-making bodies (the U.S. Congress not least among them). There is no reason to believe accreditors are immune.
Second, accreditation commissions develop the standards which determine whether schools are worthy of recognition. Commissioners may push for standards favorable to their own institutions but unfriendly to the competition. For instance, many accreditors emphasize an institution’s financial position over its student outcomes, thus favoring mediocre incumbents over scrappy newcomers. Less than one percent of incumbent institutions lose their accreditation over a five-year period.
Since many schools might not survive without the federal student aid granted by accreditation, established institutions have outsize power over the higher education marketplace. The Department of Education disbursed $126 billion in student aid last year, keeping afloat many institutions that might have failed in a truly free market. Normal market forces are corrupted when institutions can protect themselves from collapse by dint of their influence over the allocation of taxpayer subsidies.
This is an important point to understand. The prevalence of conflicts of interest among accreditation commissioners would not be concerning if accreditors did not have such an influential role in federal policy. If accreditation were not the main standard by which the Department of Education determined eligibility for federal student aid, such conflicts of interest would not create nearly as strong of an incentive for accreditors to protect poorly-performing institutions.
Brittingham writes that accreditors have “played a vital role in making U.S. colleges the envy of the world.” That is true—accreditation as an institution long predates its modern role as the gatekeeper of federal student aid. There is a place for this sort of self-regulation, but not in federal policy. Either accreditors must address their conflict of interest problem, or the Department of Education must adopt a new framework for quality assurance in higher education.
Preston Cooper is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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