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Commentary By Preston Cooper

Two Cheers for Elizabeth Warren's Accreditation Reform Bill

Education Higher Ed

The collapse of for-profit education giant ITT Technical Institute has brought renewed scrutiny upon accreditation agencies, the private organizations which determine which schools are eligible for federal student aid. ITT Tech’s accreditor, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), will likely see its recognition revoked in response to the body’s approval of ITT Tech and other troubled institutions such as Corinthian Colleges.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Senate cosponsors Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) have introduced a bill to overhaul accreditation. They are right to address this issue—accreditation’s problems are not limited to ACICS or the recent high-profile for-profit college failures. The entire system is rotten.

Accreditors often do their jobs halfheartedly. According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, accreditors revoked recognition of just 0.8% of schools from 2009 to 2014. Even worse, schools usually lose accreditation because they are financially unsound, not because their students receive a poor-quality education. In the for-profit sector, schools with better student outcomes are actually more likely to receive an accreditor rebuke than schools with worse outcomes.

Even when accreditors do take action, the Department of Education does not always do its part—the GAO report found that, in one-third of cases, an accreditor placing a school on probation elicited no follow-up actions by the Department at all.

Advocates of free markets are generally right to be skeptical of Elizabeth Warren’s proposals. However, the accreditation bill, while not perfect, represents a step forward. As accreditors are the gatekeepers of billions in taxpayer dollars, they deserve closer scrutiny and higher standards.

Currently, accreditors are required to take into account the financial health of colleges, but the law places very little emphasis on student outcomes. Changing this is one of the strongest features of the Democrats’ bill. The bill would require accreditors to assess outcome metrics such as retention rate, graduation rate, default rate, loan repayment rate, student earnings after graduation, and other measures of student achievement subject to the Secretary of Education’s discretion.

The bill would also require accreditors to consider a college’s affordability...

Read the entire piece here on Forbes

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Preston Cooper is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Economics21. Follow him on Twitter here.

Photo by Alex Wong / Getty

This piece originally appeared in Forbes