Who’s regulating for-profit schools? Execs from for-profit colleges
College accreditors have come under scrutiny recently for allowing for-profit schools to collect billions in federal aid despite low graduation and high default rates.
Accreditors are supposed to be watchdogs for college quality. They are not government agencies but colleges need an accreditor’s seal of approval so students can qualify for federal loans.
The agency that has received the most heat is the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools. ACICS allowed Corinthian Colleges Inc. to keep on operating right up until the for-profit college chain collapsed after evidence emerged that the schools hadlured thousands of poor students into predatory loans. The accreditor placed a Corinthian campus on its “ honor roll” just months before the Education Department forced the school to shut down.
ACICS, which oversees hundreds of for-profit colleges, is now the target of two governmentinvestigations. A ProPublica analysis also found that schools overseen by ACICS had thelowest graduation rates compared with other accreditors.
So who are the people behind the beleaguered accreditor? They include executives from some of the most scandal-plagued schools in the country.
We looked at all ACICS commissioners since 2010 and found that two-thirds of them have worked as executives at for-profit schools while sitting on the council. A third of the commissioners came from schools that have been facing consumer-protection lawsuits, investigations by state attorneys general, or federal financial monitoring.
Consider Beth Wilson. Wilson, the executive vice president of Corinthian Colleges, joinedACICS in 2014, less than three months after the California attorney general had filed a lawsuit against Corinthian for deceptive advertising and falsifying placement numbers. Wilson was no stranger to accreditation, as she had previously been the chair of another accreditor of primarily for-profit schools. And she was also no stranger to Corinthian’s problems. According to the attorney general’s ongoing suit, Wilson ordered employees to alter Corinthian’s job-placement statistics.
Wilson did not respond to requests for comment.
Having the majority of commissioners be industry executives violates no federal rules. The Department of Education only requires a small fraction of commissioners to be from outside the industry, and accrediting agencies of both nonprofit and for-profit schools are largely composed of industry players.
However, some education experts argue that potential conflicts of interest in for-profit accreditation are especially troubling because of the heightened scrutiny within the industry.
Robert Shireman, a former deputy undersecretary with the Department of Education and currently a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, calls the accreditation process “a giant cesspool of corruption.” Shireman, who has long worked to bolster regulation of for-profit colleges, said the accreditation process “needs to be independent” and not overseen by the industry itself. “It would be like getting the CEOs of the airlines together to review whether the airplanes are safe,” he said.
“The scandals surrounding the for-profit college industry have thrown a spotlight on flaws in the accreditation system,” said Stephen Burd, senior policy analyst at New America, a nonpartisan think tank. “These agencies turn a blind eye to abuses, and lobby on behalf of the industry.”
ACICS’ 15 commissioners, who are all unpaid, are the ultimate decision-makers about whether a school receives accreditation. ACICS, like other accrediting agencies, is funded through membership fees from the colleges it oversees, and its commissioners are mainly peer reviewers from member schools.
Al Gray, the executive director of ACICS, said the agency has a strict conflict-of-interestpolicy and recusal practices that do not allow commissioners to sit in on hearings that involve their own schools.
“It might appear that it’s compromised by the fact that the peer reviewers are affiliated with the institutions,” said Gray. “But while that may be an appearance, proper protections are Who’s regulating for-profit schools? Execs from for-profit colleges:
