The federal government’s overseer of college accreditors, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, is set to meet next week and decide whether to revoke recognition of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS). ACICS is one of several bodies that “accredit” thousands of colleges and universities in the United States, making these institutions eligible to receive taxpayer funds through Pell Grants and federal student loans. Having accredited several schools in the ill-fated Corinthian Colleges chain, ACICS now faces an onslaught from several state attorneys general, who want its recognition terminated.
“Accreditors are required by law to evaluate schools on financial characteristics, but not on whether students actually succeed. The resulting message to colleges is: as long as your finances are in order, it does not matter if your students fail.”
These politicians are correct in their assessment of ACICS as a poor gatekeeper of taxpayer dollars. The average student outcomes of schools accredited by ACICS are particularly egregious. According to my analysis of Department of Education data, 71% of ACICS schools’ students have federal student loans, and 19% default within three years. Only 50% graduate, and just 45% of enrollees earn more than the average high school degree holder. There is no way to disguise these results—ACICS schools largely fail students no matter how you measure the outcomes. However, it is erroneous to claim that such poor results are unique to ACICS-accredited institutions.
To compare these outcomes across accreditors, I give a school a “red flag” if it fares worse than the average ACICS institution on one of these four metrics: default rate, graduation rate, share of enrollees earning more than typical high school graduates, and share with federal student loans. (As I wroteearlier this month, heavy dependence on federal aid is a bad sign.) In other words, a school with a graduation rate below 50%, the ACICS average, gets a red flag. Schools with four red flags are worse than the average ACICS institution across the board—they have no bright spots.
As the chart below demonstrates, ACICS accredits the worst set of schools—but it hardly has a monopoly on poor-quality institutions. More than half of the schools recognized by every single major accreditor have at least one red flag, and 37% of the average accreditor’s schools have two red flags or more.
In total, 139 schools in this group have four red flags. Fifty-five of them, or 40%, have ACICS accreditation. While ACICS stands out for its failure, other accreditors are hardly blameless. There is little justification for accreditors, or the Department of Education , to continue extending federal money to these schools.
According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO)report, accreditors revoked the accreditation of just 0.8% of schools from 2009 to 2014. Of the 139 schools in my analysis with four red flags, just five were put on probation. One of these—Burlington College in Vermont—has since closed.
Clearly, accreditors have plenty of reason to crack down, but are not doing so.
Moreover, accreditors generally do not sanction schools because of poor student outcomes—rather, most sanctions are due to the institution’s financial troubles. The GAO report found no difference in student outcomes between colleges that received a sanction and colleges that did not. Accreditors are required by law to evaluate schools on financial characteristics, but not on whether students actually succeed.The resulting message to colleges is: as long as your finances are in order, it does not matter if your students fail.
Even when accreditors do sanction schools, the Department of Education often does very little about it. For around a third of sanctions, there is no follow-up whatsoever from the Department. The Department also does not have clear guidelines for employees to follow when schools are sanctioned—which means hundreds of billions of federal student aid dollars usually keep flowing when a school’s quality has come into question.
Some might ask whether students have a responsibility to investigate the product they are buying. This is fair—students should certainly be doing more research, and in many cases, a simple Google GOOGL -0.09% search will reveal whether a college is worth avoiding. However, the federal government also presents accreditation as a fail-safe barometer of college quality—even though any reasonable look at the evidence makes clear this is not the case. If a school is accredited and eligible for federal money, many students will naturally assume it is up to standard.
With no reliable way to turn off the taxpayer spigot, this all creates very little incentive for colleges to improve quality. Colleges are “accountable” to accreditors, but not based on student outcomes, and accreditors are “accountable” to the Department of Education, which usually fails to impose discipline. Nowhere in this top-down system is anyone accountable to students. Taxpayers are also vulnerable; they must bear the losses when students default on their loans after receiving a substandard education.
The winners here are colleges, which have access to an effectively-unlimited stream of federal money with very few measures to keep them accountable. That this framework attracts some unsavory institutions such as Corinthian Colleges and ITT Educational Services should surprise no one. The root of the problem is not ACICS—it is the structure of the whole system.
This piece originally appeared on Forbes
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Preston Cooper is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute's Economics21. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Forbes