Who’s regulating for-profit schools? Execs from for-profit colleges:
Who’s regulating for-profit schools? Execs from for-profit colleges
is story was co-published with The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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 had
lured 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.
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.
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.
