Let Colleges Choose an Accreditor. State laws that ignore Trump-era reforms should be amended posthaste.

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | February 3, 2023 | Adam Kissel

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Federal financial aid depends on whether your college is accredited. That means an independent agency vouches for your college, assuring that it’s not a scam and that it fulfills its promises. Accreditors have a huge amount of power. Too often, they abuse it. Fortunately, there are solutions.

One way that accreditors abuse power is to interfere with university governance. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) is the most notorious. SACS recently intervened in the decisions of at least three universities in Florida. The accreditor infamously threatened the august University of Virginia when it didn’t like how UVA’s board got the president to resign.

Accreditors have also interfered with the religious liberty of the schools they accredit. For example, the accreditor for New England universities threatened Gordon College because it asked for a religious exemption for federal contractors that maintain a traditional mission.

The accreditors felt bold enough to do this because, for decades, each accreditor effectively had a monopoly over its services in its region. There was only one accreditor per region, not counting “national” accreditors, which are treated as second-class (even though they aren’t).

Under Secretary DeVos, however, the U.S. Department of Education broke the regional monopolies by effectively making the accreditors into competing national bodies. Finally, colleges had a real choice. Accreditors began opening up to new areas, and colleges started switching.

The problem in some states, however, is that state law has not caught up to align with the new federal regulations. In West Virginia, for instance, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) was the presumed university accreditor because it was the only regional accreditor, and state regulations still say as much. To fix this problem and let colleges choose the accreditor that is best for them, state regulators need to amend their rules.