As is now well known, on October 24, 2023, the New York Post submitted allegations to Harvard of plagiarism committed by Dr. Gay. The Harvard Corporation, the governing body of the institution, stated that it “promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results” which they claimed, “revealed a few instances of inadequate citation” (italics added). After additional plagiarism allegations were made by an anonymous source, Dr. Gay resigned on January 2. 

In light of several credible and well-documented press reports, ACTA believes that the Harvard Corporation conducted an irregular and hasty investigation in violation of the university’s established procedures. Therefore, ACTA is asking NECHE to determine whether Harvard has the capacity, policies, procedures, safeguards, and willingness to investigate and adjudicate allegations of academic dishonesty and research misconduct equitably, ethically, and forthrightly. 

ACTA’s complaint reads, “Additional evidence suggesting that Harvard University may be in violation of several provisions of NECHE’s Standards for Accreditation continues to appear. Harvard’s former president, Dr. Claudine Gay, admitted to multiple instances in which her published work and dissertation required corrections to her citations; instances of this sort would normally be seen as plagiarism according to the Harvard Guide to Using Sources.” 

Dr. Steven McGuire, ACTA’s Research Fellow, said “Academic dishonesty offends against the very nature of the university as an institution devoted to the pursuit of truth. Unfortunately, it appears that Harvard has not followed its own policies or lived up to its motto—veritas, or truth—in reviewing the allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay. But it is critical that our elite institutions adhere to rigorous standards in such matters both for the sake of their own integrity and because the rest of higher education will follow their lead. Thus, we are asking NECHE to investigate this issue.”

To read ACTA’s complaint in its entirety, click here.

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For those who aren’t familiar with accreditation, a previous piece provided a short summary:

On paper, accreditors are private entities that review the quality of colleges. They serve as one of the three legs of the program-integrity triad that ensures colleges provide their students a decent education (the other two legs being the U.S. Department of Education [ED] and state authorization for colleges). For a college’s students to receive federal financial aid like Pell grants or student loans, the college must be accredited. Accreditors themselves must be approved by the Department of Education. So ED approves accreditors, which in turn approve colleges, which then allows ED to finance colleges via student aid.

Accreditors have immense power. Essentially, they can destroy any college by cutting off access to federal financial aid. And with that great power comes surprisingly little responsibility. Federal law spells out ten areas where accreditors must have accreditation standards (accreditors are given free rein over the content of those standards), but an elastic clause allows them to impose additional standards as well.

This clause gives accreditors essentially unchecked power, and as if to prove Lord Acton’s warning correct, accreditors have proceeded to abuse this power. A recent report by Adam Kissel and Timothy J. Rosenberger, Jr. documents some of these abuses, including (though see the report for many more):

• “In 2006, the [American Bar Association] ABA then required law schools to demonstrate ‘concrete action’ to admit students (as well as hire faculty and staff) who were ‘diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.’ As the American Council of Trustees and Alumni noted, ‘the ABA specifically warned schools in states such as California where voters rejected racial preferences, that even they must find a way to comply.’”
• “In May 2021, SACS interfered with the Florida State University (FSU) presidential search when it complained that candidate Richard Corcoran (today president of New College of Florida) was also on the governing board. SACS president Belle Wheelan argued that Corcoran should step down in order to be a candidate. Yet he was also the state’s education commissioner, and ‘The state Constitution requires the education commissioner to have a seat on the university system’s Board of Governors.’”
• “WASC’s Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges ‘released a ‘Policy on Social Justice’ in June 2021 pledging to create a ‘climate’ of ‘anti-racism’ among accredited schools.”

To fight back, education reformers need to do a few things. First, colleges need to have choices among accreditors. If one accreditor abuses its power, colleges should have the option to switch to a non-abusive one. But until recently, switching was mostly forbidden. Accreditors were assigned geographic regions over which they had a quasi-monopoly. The Trump administration abolished the regional quasi-monopolies, and shortly thereafter, the state of Florida required its public colleges to switch away from a particularly abusive accreditor. The Biden administration sought to intervene to prevent switching, spurring a clash between Gov. Ron DeSantis and President Joe Biden. Gov. DeSantis recently won the fight, noting that “The Biden Administration backed down & allowed a Florida college to seek new accreditation.”

This is a reformist’s victory, all but ensuring that abusive accreditors will face market pressure. Sadly, this first step, while necessary, is not sufficient to undo or prevent future damage caused by the cudgel of accreditation.

The elastic clause still gives accreditors too much power and the left is urging accreditors to use it. Edward Conroy, Da’Shon Carr, and Olivia Cheche, writing for the progressive New America, explain that “it’s so critical that accreditors are mindful of the role they can play in establishing and strengthening standards that promote  DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion].” The elastic clause allows accreditors to mandate DEI, and most of them have: “Standards related to DEI are not a new area for many accreditors. Six of the seven major accreditors already have diversity and equity metrics in their standards” and the remaining holdout has DEI policies in all but name.

Back in 1909 Henry Ford only produced black cars, and when asked if other paint colors were an option, he replied, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Fast forward to 2023, and colleges can now use any accreditor they want, so long as it mandates DEI.

There are a few policies that could help to address this problem. First, as Lindsey M. Burke, Adam Kissel, Armand Alacbay, and Kyle Beltramini contend, “Congress must prevent accreditors from using their gate-keeping power to impose inappropriate regulations on institutions” by revoking the elastic clause. Accreditors could sneak DEI requirements under the ten mandated standards areas, but that would likely spur legal challenges.

The next Republican Secretary of Education will also have many additional options. The Secretary can and should approve new accreditors to ensure a sufficient diversity of perspectives on DEI are available. The Secretary also has the power to end federal recognition of accreditors that impose ideological litmus tests on the colleges they oversee.

Gov. DeSantis won an early battle to ensure that colleges can switch away from abusive accreditors, but the war is far from over.

This article appeared on Minding The Campus on September 13, 2023.

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The members of the subcommittee of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) who wrote the report said the rules are a “mess,” allow accreditors to set flexible standards or none at all, and lead to inconsistent expectations in terms of student achievement.

“Not only does this latitude risk accountability, it creates an unhealthy and dangerous variety and inconsistency of expectations regarding student achievement across institutions,” the report says.

Accreditors are charged with monitoring the quality of higher education institutions and holding them accountable, and NACIQI plays a key role in the oversight of federally recognized accreditors.

The report recommends that Congress dig deeper into the rules to fix the issue, though it doesn’t offer a specific solution. The subcommittee also wants the department to “clarify what it means for an agency to have a standard (or standards) that ‘assess’ an institution’s success with regard to student achievement.” Some experts said that NACIQI’s recommendations could lead accreditors to focus more on student outcomes.

The subcommittee wrote that in its view accreditors should have standards that they set to assess student achievement. Additionally, agencies should show NACIQI and the Education Department their own assessment of their institutions by providing “some form of summary information regarding its results,” per the report.

NACIQI and department staff have created dashboards for individual accreditors looking at the graduation rates for the agency’s portfolio of institutions and other data points. The subcommittee recommended that agencies should at least comment on these data as part of the review process.

“We are not suggesting Congress establish or impose the student achievement standards and measures for accreditation purposes,” the report says. “We are suggesting that the accreditors be required more firmly to establish standards and that the department and NACIQI have a stronger role in determining whether accrediting agencies are indeed robustly establishing these standards and also reviewing, evaluating and judging their institutions’ performance in a way that ensures institutional quality.”

Institution representatives on the committee and some experts worry that even discussing changing the law could lead to “bright-line” standards, which would be akin to “unleashing Pandora’s box,” said Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College and a member of NACIQI, at the committee’s recent meeting.

‘Status Quo Isn’t Good Enough’

he subcommittee’s 19-page report, which the full group unanimously approved, highlights concerns and offers recommendations to address a range of topics under the accreditation umbrella, from how the agencies handle complaints about institutions to the requirement that agencies should have public members on their boards. (A public member is considered someone who is not an employee or connected to an institution the agency oversees or a member of any related trade association.)

The Education Department is planning to update its accreditation regulations, and the committee’s policy recommendations could inform that effort. NACIQI rarely issues reports like this, so experts say it’s an important document that could also add to the broader conversation about how to improve accreditation—one of the gatekeepers to federal student aid.

Consumer protection advocates and others have wanted NACIQI to get tougher on accreditation agencies, which they say have failed at times in their oversight of institutions.

“I think what they’ve put together here would go a long way toward pushing accrediting agencies to take seriously the question of student outcomes, even if it’s not quite far enough to fully mandate that accreditors take it seriously,” said Clare McCann, a higher education fellow at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy, who previously worked in the Education Department during the current administration.

The subcommittee didn’t reach consensus on all the recommendations but did on which topics to include.

If it were easy to create lines, accreditors would not be needed. Accreditors exist because there are judgments that need to be made.—Jamienne Studley, President of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission

The bulk of the discussion at the committee’s summer meeting last week focused on the report’s student achievement section. Federal law currently prohibits the U.S. education secretary from setting any criteria or prescribing standards that accrediting agencies would have to use to assess any institution’s success with respect to student achievement.

Roslyn Clark Artis, president of Benedict College and another member of the accrediting panel, said she had “serious trepidation” about modifying the current restriction.

“To remove the handcuffs and allow, potentially, havoc to be wrecked on diverse institutions and/or agencies who are trying to assess very different kinds of institutions contextually is incredibly dangerous,” she said.

Jennifer Blum, a higher education lawyer and one of the report’s authors, said the report is focused on a more basic problem than benchmarks or metrics for student accountability.

“I think agencies are all over the map on what standards for student achievement they have,” she said. “I fear and worry that we have agencies that aren’t clear to their own institutions about their expectations or letting institutions set expectations for themselves.”

Blum said the report shows that there’s a consensus the current laws and regulations are a problem and need attention.

“The status quo isn’t good enough,” she said. “We can get to a middle ground. It’s not as impossible as we all want to think it is.”

Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said accreditation currently doesn’t protect the public or ensure quality. He’d like to see an emphasis on nationally normed findings that show how students are learning.

“I’m all for nuance, but I would like to see guardrails that tell us what actually is happening, at least in the aggregate,” he said.

Reactions to the Report

Jamienne Studley, president of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission, said the committee’s conversation mirrored the ongoing debate over whether and how to set standards and benchmarks for student achievement.

“President Artis did a wonderful job of conveying the dangers of overreliance on just numbers and the importance of having subtlety in the analysis,” she said. “If it were easy to create lines, accreditors would not be needed. Accreditors exist because there are judgments that need to be made.”

Studley added that the conversation about using data to identify institutions’ strengths and weaknesses is far from over.

“I appreciated what appeared to be broad but not universal agreement that there should not be bright lines and that there are serious dangers to being too by-the-numbers for such a complicated analysis,” she said.

Studley chaired NACIQI in 2012 when the panel released a similar report. She said this latest report provides a shared starting point for individuals to dig deeper into the issues.

“I welcome the evolution of some of these important conversations and the constructive tone that everybody seems to bring to it,” she said.

Similarly, McCann said the report will add to the broader public conversation about how to improve accreditation.

“What’s nice about this is NACIQI put together some really actionable ideas here, with language in some cases,” she said. “These are things that the department can really work with and that Congress can really work with in terms of making some improvements, even if they’re somewhat modest.”

McCann said the committee’s recommendations do seem responsive to issues raised recently about accreditors such as that the agencies don’t focus enough on student outcomes.

“They’ve done a pretty good job of pulling together some of the key things that we’ve let slide over the last decade or so,” she said. “We’ve really let accreditors run the show on a lot of things.”

If enacted, the recommendations could lead to “real, serious improvement” from the accreditors, she said.

“The big picture of what they’re getting at is they’re not trying to get the department to set a number and to hold the accrediting agencies to it,” she said. “They’re trying to get accrediting agencies to step up.”

She said that NACIQI seems to want accreditors to bring data to the table and show more information about how they work with institutions identified as falling short on student achievement.

Over all, she said she thought the subcommittee struck a good balance on student achievement and other issues with which the committee has been grappling.

“They see these issues popping up with institutions,” she said. “They see problems concentrated within certain accreditors. They want to address them, and the accreditors are just simply not responsive enough to those concerns.”

Michael Brickman, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said he wants to see a focus on accountability but doesn’t want to see a No Child Left Behind for higher education. The 2001 law for K-12 schools held schools accountable for student outcomes.

“There have been discussions at NACIQI and elsewhere around imposing a certain view of what student achievement accountability should look like,” he said. “But I think it’s pretty clear the Department of Education does not have the authority to do that, and that NACIQI, which is an advisory committee, has no authority there.”

Brickman, who helped to update the accreditation regulations in 2019 during the Trump administration, said he supports publishing more data to increase transparency but gets more concerned when attaching stakes to the data.

“I understand we can look at graduation rates and very basic metrics like that, but I think it’s very hard to tell the story based on some very simple metrics like that,” he said.

This post appeared on Inside Higher Ed on August 7, 2023.

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Last fall, when Hamline University’s administration punished Erika López Prater for showing paintings of the prophet Muhammad to her art history class, PEN America called it “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory.” Where is Hamline’s accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, on this issue? The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has filed a complaint with HLC, but months later, the accreditor has taken no public action to ensure that Hamline respects the norms of academic freedom.

Did the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges act when Sam Joeckel claimed he was fired from Palm Beach Atlantic University for discussing racial justice during his English class? Joeckel has not been reinstated, and the university has not been placed on probation.

How about the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities? How could it find Linfield University “substantially” in compliance with its standards of accreditation after Linfield terminated tenured English professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, arguably for publicly sharing allegations of sexual misconduct and antisemitism involving trustees and administrators? The American Association of University Professors’ investigation found that Linfield had violated both Pollack-Pelzner’s academic freedom and the institution’s own internal regulations, yet no lasting action was taken by its accreditor.

I could continue to list examples, but my point ought to be clear: if protecting academic freedom is central to the accreditors’ missions, then at best their oversight is toothless, and at worst their inaction encourages bad actors.

Just as interesting is how the two authors approach the issue of institutional governance. Lawrence Schall, president of the New England Commission of Higher Education, notes that “the responsibility for the development of—and the academic freedom to deliver—academic programs rests squarely with the faculty, not the president, not the governing board and absolutely not the government.” Jamienne Studley, president of the WASC Senior College and University Commission, takes a similar tack with her view that accreditors must protect institutions from “external forces,” including “governing boards when they act beyond their charge, or state or federal executives or legislatures, or parents or donors.” When these forces threaten the core principles of higher education, according to Studley, accreditors are there to act as impartial and expert “referees.” Notably absent from either of their op-eds is a proper understanding of, or indeed any reference to, shared governance.

The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities—written and endorsed by the AAUP, the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges—captures the complex nature of higher education governance perfectly. It recognizes that the “inescapable interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, students, and others” necessitates collaboration. Far from adversarial threats to a college’s autonomy, these groups are important stakeholders who ought to be heard rather than shunned. For example, contrary to Schall’s attempt to silo academic matters with the faculty alone, the report notes that the “relative emphasis to be given to the various elements of the educational and research program should involve participation of governing board, administration, and faculty prior to final decision.”

It is particularly disturbing to see Studley include governing boards—at least those she deems to be operating “beyond their charge”—among her list of “external forces,” which frames trustees as a contingent rather than a constituent part of higher education. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of a board’s nature and purpose. The 1966 statement recognizes the board’s role as the “final institutional authority” with a “special obligation to ensure that the history of the college or university shall serve as a prelude and inspiration to the future.” The voluntary, lay nature of trustee governance allows boards to represent the institution as a whole rather than any individual constituency. It is this unique position that enables boards to act as guardians of their institution’s mission and mediators between stakeholders on and off campus. When operating under the leadership of informed, engaged trustees, boards serve to enrich the greatest strength of American higher education: its diversity. Attempts by accreditors to apply a singular vision of what higher education ought to be, rather than respect its plurality of values and structures, should be greeted with ultimate skepticism.

Unsurprisingly, there is an external actor Studley omits from her list: the accreditors themselves. These entities should react to obvious abuses on campus, as the massive public investment in higher education demands stronger oversight—particularly related to student outcomes, where accreditors have a sad record of failure. Accreditors need to redouble their efforts in ensuring an education of quality. This is more likely to happen if they approach institutional governance with a degree of humility stemming from the recognition that they are outsiders on campus, too often wielding power instead of insight. In this they violate the very principles of shared governance and institutional autonomy they claim to be upholding.

This article appeared in Inside Higher Ed on June 21, 2023.

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Higher education accreditation creates barriers to entry for innovative start-ups while being a poor gauge of program quality and student outcomes. What began as a voluntary system became a de facto requirement, with accreditors abusing their power. To harness the potential of new learning modes, policymakers should consider meaningful structural changes to this ossified system. Any substantial higher education reform must include accreditation reform: decoupling accreditation from student aid, ending regional monopolies, and inhibiting abuses of power. Addressing these issues would help accreditors to return to quality control while supporting innovation.

Key Takeaways

This report was originally published by The Heritage Foundation on June 20, 2023.

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That may seem like a mind-numbing bit of insider baseball, but with the introduction of Senate Bill 680, North Carolina legislators may be able to do what once seemed impossible ― break up the outdated regional accreditation monopoly. In doing so, the bill upends the long-standing system of regional monopolies which locks schools into the authority of a geographically assigned, quasi-governmental regulatory agency. With the element of choice comes pressure on the accreditors to stay in their lane of academic quality assurance (and get better at it!) and exercise greater fairness or lose market share. 

For most schools, being in an accreditor’s good favor is a matter of financial survival since six regional higher education accreditors currently control access to over $100 billion in student loan funding. Prior to a federal rule that went into effect in 2020, schools could not leave an accreditor that they found capricious, unfair or inappropriately controlling. 

But accreditors are imperfect judges of quality and ought to be taken to task. For example, nearly 50 nonprofit colleges and universities that have four-year graduation rates of 20% or less still receive accreditation from SACSCOC. It is not rare to find accredited schools that saddle their graduates with crippling debt, graduate less than one in 10 students on time, or spend more on marketing than financial aid.  

It is ludicrous to claim that this oversight authority is working as intended when student loan debt has nearly doubled to $1.76 trillion in just the past decade.  

In fact, accreditors have a history of obstructing attempts to improve educational quality or, as is the case with SACSCOC, do not understand the proper role of the governing boards. Earlier this year, the UNC Chapel Hill Board of Trustees passed a resolution requesting that the university accelerate its development of a School of Civic Life and Leadership. In response to media attention, and without reading the board’s resolution, SACSCOC President Belle Wheelan threatened UNC Chapel Hill’s accreditation and arrogantly stated that the proper role for a member of a governing board should be, “Eyes in, hands off.”  

While Dr. Wheelan’s statement displays a dangerous misunderstanding of the proper role of a higher education institution’s governing board, this is not the first time SACSCOC has improperly used its authority. 

In the early 2000s, SACSCOC placed one university on probation because it had a standard teaching load of 15 hours per week rather than SACSCOC’s mandated 12 hours. SACSOC’s micromanagement forced the consolidation of class sections, and previously small class sizes grew to 60 or more students. In 2014, an independent investigator hired by UNC to investigate academic misconduct revealed that “more than 3,100 students received irregular instruction in African and Afro-American studies paper classes, where students would not have to attend class or complete any assignments, except one — a paper due at the end of the semester that Crowder, a non-faculty member, would grade extremely leniently.” 

In that case, apparently, SACSOC was not only hands off but blind as well. 

A recent article published by the Coalition for Carolina Foundation attempts to undermine the legislature’s role in its oversight authority of UNC. “It is always risky to change accreditors, but when politicians are trying to drive an accreditor change … it becomes dangerous,” the article states. However, this claim is simply not true. Legislators are elected to oversee public universities, and since Sen. Berger learned of SACSCOC’s intention to send a warning letter to UNC Chapel Hill, he is adhering to the oath he took upon entering office.  

If passed, Senate Bill 680 would not cure all that ails accreditation; that calls for a comprehensive overhaul at the federal level. But given Congress’s gridlock, it may be time to look to the states. North Carolina has a chance to strike a blow against the regional monopoly power that accreditors hold. With their fiefdoms threatened, perhaps individual accreditors will respond by innovating — or be consigned to the dustbin of history, as a better system of quality assurance emerges.

This originally appeared on The North State Journal on May 22, 2023.

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The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS) is the accreditor for UNC. SACS President Belle Wheelan told the Governor’s Commission on the Governance of Public Universities last month that the UNC trustees’ vote to create the school was “kind of not the way we do business” and that SACS would “talk to them . . . and either get them to change it, or the institution will be on warning with [SACS], I’m sure.”

Ms. Wheelan is now learning that the accreditor has an accreditor too. In a letter to the Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), committee member Michael Poliakoff requests a review of SACS and its actions surrounding the UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership. Ms. Wheelan had informed the Governor’s Commission that the school would be getting a letter of inquiry from SACS before the UNC trustees had received it, and before she had read the trustee’s proposal.

Reports “of the unprofessional behavior of SACSCOC’s president, Dr. Belle Wheelan,” Mr. Poliakoff writes, “make it incumbent upon NACIQI to exercise its oversight of the accreditor.” Not doing so would “erode public confidence in NACIQI’s commitment to its statutory duty.” In other words, when an objective accreditor begins to sound like it’s pushing a political agenda, it’s time for adult oversight.

SACS is accredited by the Department of Education every five years and it must be “a reliable authority to determine the quality of education or training in accordance with the Higher Education Act,” Mr. Poliakoff writes. Ms. Wheelan’s skepticism of the new school parroted faculty complaints without independent judgment. Her actions also indicate a “misunderstanding of the duty of higher education governing boards to ensure that their institutions operate under the highest standards of academic excellence,” his letter says.

Accreditors like SACS are powerful because their approval lets UNC and other schools qualify for federal dollars. But NACIQI is responsible for making sure the accreditors are operating with integrity and objectivity.

Threatening UNC’s accreditation over its attempt to create an academic environment for debate and civic life would strike most Americans as laughable, since that’s the core of what universities are expected to provide. A recent poll by Centiment shows that 73% of North Carolinians agree that Chapel Hill should promote freedom of thought and speech, and 72% say diversity of viewpoint is “a very important form of diversity for all colleges and universities.”

Taxpayers also like the idea of the new school. Two-thirds say they support the creation of a special school “to teach the skills of civic discourse and respectful debate.” Less than 10% didn’t like the idea. Nearly 75% said they believe students at taxpayer-funded universities “deserve to hear both sides of important political questions.”

Ms. Wheelan gave the Governor’s Commission a list of “What a Trustee is NOT,” so we’d suggest she review What an Accreditor is NOT. That would include One Who Runs the Institution.

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal on February 28, 2023.

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Higher education accreditation may seem a ho-hum bit of insider baseball dictated at the federal level. But with Governor DeSantis’s signature, Florida has done what seemed impossible. It refused to grin and bear this intrusion on state and local governance.

Within the legislation is a requirement for the state’s public colleges and universities to leave their current, regionally assigned accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), and find another. In doing so, the bill upends the longstanding system of regional monopolies that locks schools into the authority of a geographically assigned regulatory agency. With the element of choice comes pressure on the accreditors to exercise greater fairness or lose market share.

Since the six regional higher education accreditors currently control access to over $116 billion in student loan funding, for most schools, the accreditor’s will is a matter of financial survival.  Hitherto, schools had no opportunity to leave an accreditor that they found capricious, unfair, or inappropriately controlling.  

Industry insiders argue that accreditors deserve their plenipotentiary authority because they provide unique assurance that taxpayers’ investments only flow to reputable schools that offer a high-quality education. We are told that without the active oversight of accreditors, predatory institutions will mislead applicants and waste taxpayer money.

But accreditors are unreliable judges of quality. There are, for example, nearly 50 four-year, nonprofit colleges and universities that have four-year graduation rates of 20% or less and still receive accreditation from SACSCOC. It is not uncommon to find accredited schools that saddle their graduates with crippling debt, graduate less than one in ten students on time, or spend more on marketing than financial aid. It is an implausible claim that this oversight authority is working as intended when student loan debt has nearly doubled to $1.75 trillion in the past 10 years.

In reality, accreditors have a long history of frustrating attempts to improve educational quality or have been absent from the oversight that really matters. In the early 2000s, SACSCOC placed Campbell University on probation because it had a standard teaching load of 15 hours per week rather than SACSCOC’s mandated 12 hours. Campbell was forced to consolidate class sections, with previously small class sizes growing to 60 or more students. In 2013, when Florida legislators attempted to streamline the state’s general education requirements, SACSCOC stymied their efforts by demanding final approval. And worse yet, in 2017, as the trade journal Inside Higher Ed reported, “The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsored fake classes for nearly two decades, giving students, many of them athletes, credit for courses never taught by instructors.” Where was SACSCOC all that time?

This lackluster protection of student success is perplexing, given SACSCOC’s willingness to wade into matters of governance. In 2013, when then-governor Rick Scott suggested that Florida A&M University should suspend its president following a student hazing death, SACSCOC threatened the institution’s accreditation status because of what it viewed as Governor Scott’s undue influence. SACSCOC’s president boasted, “I did write the governor and tell him back off.” In the previous year, SACSCOC put the University of Virginia “on warning” after its Board of Visitors—which by state statute has complete authority over the hiring and firing of the president—sought and obtained the president’s resignation. In other words, SACSCOC privileged its own judgment over the authority of state law and the board.

Governor DeSantis’s signature on S.B. 7044 put an end to this accreditor’s party.

Florida’s latest efforts will not be enough to correct all the problems with accreditation: It needs a comprehensive overhaul at the federal level. But given the reluctance Congress has shown, it may be time to look to the states. By becoming the first state to require public institutions of higher education to change their accreditor, Florida has a chance to strike a blow against the regional monopolies that accreditors hold. With their fiefdoms threatened, perhaps individual accreditors will be pushed to compete, specialize, or innovate—or be consigned to the dustbin of history, as a better system of quality assurance emerges.

Paul S. Levy is founder and managing partner of JLL Partners, served on the University of Pennsylvania Board of Trustees, and is now on the Board of Directors of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Kyle Beltramini is a policy research fellow for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The article can be originally found here.

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S.B. 7044 allows the Florida Board of Governors to adopt “a comprehensive post-tenure review every 5 years.” It will also require public colleges and universities to itemize proposed changes in tuition and fees in advance and post “additional information about textbooks and instructional materials” at least 45 days before the first day of class in each term. These reforms ensure that students are not ambushed by hidden fees and sudden tuition hikes and will have a more thorough knowledge of course content before selecting their classes. “It was once common to hear America’s higher education called ‘the envy of the world.’ Today, we see an example of how Florida intends to make sure that is a reality,” concluded Dr. Poliakoff. Read his full statement here.

MEDIA CONTACT: Gabrielle Anglin
EMAIL: ganglin@GoACTA.org
PHONE: (202) 798-5425

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For 26 years, the organization I lead, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni—or ACTA for short—has labored to ensure that college students receive an academically rich and thorough education at an affordable price. We promote the “Three A’s”: Academic Excellence, Academic Freedom, and Accountability. And Florida leads in all three of those.

In 2019, the State University System of Florida adopted the Chicago Principles on Freedom of Expression, the gold standard for freedom of thought and opinion. It is one of only 84 institutions to make this demonstration of intellectual integrity. Since 2021, Florida colleges and universities have had one of the strongest requirements for civic literacy all around the nation.

Today marks another great chapter. There is no doubt that tenure without accountability is an invitation to abuse. Authorizing regular post-tenure review is a best practice, and it is properly established in Senate Bill 7044.

ACTA has exposed in recent years a veritable rogue’s gallery of frivolous college courses around the nation: zombies, vampires, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga—I am not joking—and even Peanuts comics. Bravo for the transparency to make syllabi and textbooks available for the inspection of students, parents, and taxpayers. Core general education courses should be reliably robust and transferable across institutions. This is a bulwark against the wasting of opportunity costs and student and taxpayers’ money. 

Regional accreditors have been delegated enormous authority to grant or withhold federal student aid, which is life or death for most colleges and universities. And they have too often been a law unto themselves. The system has devolved to over-regulation and intrusion into matters properly left to governing boards and to the state. ACTA has had to fight over the years to preserve institutions’ religious liberty and their curricular decisions. Senate Bill 7044 is a bold innovation that moves accreditation from being a regional monopoly into the twenty-first century, bringing ultimately choice for schools and a wholesome competition among the accreditors. 

It was once common to hear America’s higher education called “the envy of the world.” Today, we see an example of how Florida intends to make sure that is a reality.

Thank you senator, president, and governor for doing this.

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