It’s the Accreditation, Stupid!

The good news is that the Left has noticed what a scam college accreditation is. The bad news: They want the federal government to take it over.

“Accreditors are self-regulating membership organizations,” Ben Miller, David Bergeron and Carmel Martin write in a report released this month by the Center for American Progress (CAP).  “This means that agencies’ revenue comes almost entirely from dues and fees paid by the institutions they oversee.”

“This includes annual sustaining fees, as well as payments for specific functions such as an initial review to judge if an institution meets standards for approval or special visits if an institution faces a sanction. This financial arrangement creates potential conflicts of interest, where an accreditor is both a membership organization beholden to the institutions that pay it for its continued existence but also tasked with overseeing these schools and evaluating their quality. Terminating a member institution’s approval thus results in lost revenue for the accreditation agency.”

True enough, as, for example, the venerable economist Richard Vedder has been pointing out for years.

Yet and still, the CAP solution is to, ultimately, “Put the federal government in charge of verifying, enforcing, and judging the effectiveness of outcome measures, as well as selecting third-party standard setters.”

They unveiled this proposal at their headquarters with an Undersecretary of the Obama Administration’s Department of Education in attendance on October 6, 2016.

Here’s a thought: Wouldn’t it be interesting if they got their wish and Trump got elected and plastered his name, image and ethos all over their beloved program and every university he could get around to remodeling?

Photo by DonkeyHotey

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