The Watchdogs of College Education Rarely Bite
Accreditors keep hundreds of schools with low graduation rates or high loan defaults alive
Most colleges can’t keep their doors open without an accreditor’s seal of approval, which is needed to get students access to federal loans and grants. But accreditors hardly ever kick out the worst-performing colleges and lack uniform standards for assessing graduation rates and loan defaults.
Those problems are blamed by critics for deepening the student-debt crisis as college costs soared during the past decade. Last year alone, the U.S. government sent $16 billion in aid to students at four-year colleges that graduated less than one-third of their students within six years, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of the latest available federal data.
Nearly 350 out of more than 1,500 four-year colleges now accredited by one of six regional commissions have a lower graduation rate or higher student-loan default rate than the average among the colleges that were banished by the same accreditors since 2000, the Journal’s analysis shows.
“They told me I could build a future there,” says Rachel Williams, 24 years old, who dropped out of Kentucky State University in Frankfort in 2013 because her family couldn’t afford the college anymore and she was losing faith in it. She amassed about $34,000 in federally backed loans.
Kentucky State has a graduation rate of just 18%, and nearly 30% of students who began repaying their loans in fiscal 2011 had defaulted within three years.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges reaffirmed Kentucky State’s accreditation in 2009. A preliminary report by the reviewers made no mention of loan defaults and praised Kentucky State for plans to improve its graduation rate.
College officials say they couldn’t find the final report and wouldn’t comment on the findings. The accreditation group doesn’t publicly release reports.
Belle Wheelan, president of the Southern Association, which is based in Decatur, Ga., and reviews colleges in 11 states, declines to comment on Kentucky State but says accreditors don’t follow “bright lines” when assessing performance because students enter college The Watchdogs of College Education Rarely Bite - WSJ: