Fridays entry touched on the different aspects of a schools operation that accreditors will oversee, some of them having little to do with academics, like a schools financial situation, and some of them of questionable academic importance, like requiring schools to prefer full time faculty to part time ones.

Accreditors arent always masters of their own destinies anymore, however. While they started privately, as associations of colleges and universities in a particular geographical area or that had a particular mission or religious aspect in common, in the last few decades they have fallen into the orbit of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), which oversees accreditors via a “National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity”. As part of the federal financial aid system, ED has maneuvered accreditors into the role of gatekeepers for federal money — schools in the U.S. that are not accredited by an ED-approved accreditor cannot participate in federal financial aid programs. Since that money is the lifeblood of many colleges and universities (whether public, non-profit, or proprietary), this means that accreditation is not just a third party confirmation of academic legitimacy, its a mandatory process by which many schools will either live or die.

Not everyone believes that this expansion of scope for accreditation is ideal, however. In an opinion piece, Peter McPherson and R. Michael Tanner, and president and vice president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, suggest that accreditors focus on academic quality and leave federal financial aid gate keeping to the U.S. Department of Education. In discussing the problem of high rates of default on students loans by students at certain schools, for example, they say:

While some loan defaults are the result of bad economic times, the situation requires scrutiny. Are students given enough protection and taxpayers provided enough accountability?

We believe the situation calls for a refocusing on how the government ensures that federal student aid funds are being used wisely. We propose that accrediting agencies focus on institutional quality and the Education Department — armed with higher standards and some new tools — undertake a more rigorous financial review to determine which institutions should be eligible to award federal student aid.

This is a good suggestion, well worth considering. The independent validation of academic legitimacy that comes from accreditation has been a hallmark of the American system of higher education for decades, and part of its success. Bolting additional responsibilities onto that system hasnt worked out so well, and its a welcome development that theres growing realization of this.

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