Buyer beware. Seems like common sense. We’re wary when we buy a power tool on Facebook Marketplace. We don’t assume quality; we investigate. We double-check. We’re worried about getting scammed.
Resources flow toward administrators who manage accreditation paperwork instead of teaching and student success. Innovation is discouraged, conformity rewarded.
But that instinct seems to vanish when it comes to picking a college. For this, we’re all in, despite the price tag, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is skyrocketing. Just look, for example, at a private liberal arts school like Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. The total annual cost is a whopping $92,751 a year. And what does the buyer get at this price point? Well, buyer beware.
Earlier this month, Jeanne Allen, founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform and a longtime education policy reformer, published a report for the American Enterprise Institute titled “Rethinking Accreditation in Higher Education.” Allen, who has spent decades demanding accountability in education, including time as a senior official in the U.S. Department of Education, offers a blunt conclusion about the accreditation process that certifies institutions, describing it as a “compliance maze that neither ensures quality nor empowers consumers.”
Voluntary accreditation has served as a gatekeeper in higher ed since the 19th century, but it gradually grew more regulatory and bureaucratic over the 20th century. Since 1992, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) has been responsible for the approval process, which Allen sees as “opaque, political, and fundamentally misaligned with student needs.” The NACIQI can recommend action, but it lacks enforcement power, so blatant failures are not linked to accountability.
So students are asked to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college education, yet almost no one tells them what they are actually buying. Are they paying for learning? Job-ready skills? Long-term economic mobility? Or are they simply purchasing a seat and a certificate? Accreditation has long been treated as a guarantee of institutional quality — but is it?
Allen puts it candidly: “Today, accreditation largely rewards seat time, inputs, and bureaucratic conformity — not value, performance, or opportunity.” If accreditation is supposed to guarantee quality education, her words should be unsettling to every parent, student, and taxpayer.
So whose feet are held to the fire? No one, really, Allen writes, as accreditors seldom revoke institutions’ approval when it is explicitly linked to academic failure. The NACIQI can recommend action, but it lacks enforcement power, meaning even apparent failures rarely result in accountability.
So how do “customers” know what they are buying? Allen believes that kicking the tires at college or university is difficult, as federal tools such as College Navigator and College Scorecard offer incomplete and inconsistent data, leaving families without clear information about post-graduation outcomes. Students remain blind to the very question that, for most people, matters most: how will my education help me get a job?
Allen’s findings make clear that accreditation’s failures also leave taxpayers holding the bag. Because accreditation unlocks access to federal aid, colleges continue drawing taxpayer-funded dollars even as students fail to graduate, learn, or find work. Accreditors rarely pull approval for academic failure — why would they? They’d lose money. Pell Grants and federally backed loans keep the cash flowing.
This could be an issue with the rise of AI, as Allen notes the increase in large numbers of “Pell runners,” students enrolling simply to secure aid and letting AI do the work, as Allen notes. Even when students are caught plagiarizing, they remain on the rolls, and the money keeps flowing in. What incentives would the institutions have to cut them off? This seems like a bubble waiting to burst, with taxpayers, of course, left with the bill.
Allen labels these pathologies a “compliance economy.” Resources flow toward administrators who manage accreditation paperwork instead of teaching and student success. Innovation is discouraged, conformity rewarded. The process “consumes billions in time, talent, and tuition,” she writes.
The knock-on effect comes in a wave of school closures and mergers. According to the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 607 colleges closed or merged between 2014 and 2020. The 2018–19 academic year saw 236 closures — the highest on record — the system is buckling.
Allen offers sound advice to fix the broken accreditation process. She recommends a federal “outcomes-based” eligibility standard managed by the Treasury, coupled with a database that follows “earnings, employment, completion, and value” of students. She also wants to give states autonomy to approve their own accreditation paths. This reform is already underway with the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), a first-of-its-kind accrediting body founded by six state university systems in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.
If colleges want to operate like businesses, which they clinically seem to be doing, then they should be held to business standards. A company that sells a defective product eventually loses customers. But it looks like the diploma mill will keep turning — something has to give.
Buyer beware.
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