Andrew Gillen
Andrew Gillen
President Trump signed an executive order concerning accreditation in higher education yesterday that could be a game-changer.
For those of you who’ve never heard of accreditation, it is the quality assurance mechanism used to (attempt to) safeguard taxpayer funding in higher education. If a university wants its students to be able to receive Pell Grants or take out student loans, then it must get the approval of an accreditor. Accreditors themselves are quasi-private entities that evaluate colleges to maintain (in theory) a minimal level of quality.
Accreditation suffers from a host of problems. A recent paper of mine documents the biggest ones, which fall into three buckets: foundational (e.g., accreditors fail in their quality assurance role), public-choice (e.g., accreditors abuse their power as gatekeeper for taxpayer funding), and operational (e.g., accreditors focus on inputs and processes as opposed to outputs and outcomes).
The problem is that there isn’t a clearly better way to provide quality assurance in an environment with heavy taxpayer subsidies. The federal government taking over from accreditors would be terrible—it wouldn’t weed out low-quality colleges, it would reduce university autonomy and diversity, it would suppress innovation, and it would lead to the politicization of education. But the market wouldn’t work either since the available government subsidies in the form of Pell Grants and student loans so distort price signals and market discipline and feedback that it would result in even more wasteful government subsidization in higher education. There are ways to address this problem, including eliminating government financed student loans, but until then, we should fix accreditation.
Which brings us to Trump’s executive order. I see four promising aspects of the order.
Hold Accreditors Accountable When They Abuse Their Power
One of the problems with accreditation is that it allows accreditors to abuse their power by using the threat of cutting off taxpayer funding to force colleges to dance to the accreditor’s tune. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/executive-order-accreditation-higher-education-looks-promising