New Accreditors Are Available for Mission-Driven Universities

Michael [Brickman] has written before about the value of the reforms to university accreditation implemented by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) under the leadership of Secretary Betsy DeVos. Passed in 2019, these regulations significantly overhauled the way accreditors are recognized and governed, holding legacy agencies accountable and opening the doors for new ones to enter the space and compete with established counterparts.

In just the several years since their enactment, some states (such as Florida and North Carolina) are already moving to have their public institutions switch accreditors. Texas is considering a similar move. Meanwhile, for the first time in recent memory, new accrediting agencies are cropping up, challenging the regional monopoly formerly enjoyed by six legacy accreditors. Promisingly, some of those legacy accreditors are consequently moving outside their traditional regions and making their own cases to institutions willing to switch.

Michael has also written about the looming presence of new guidelines expected to be finalized by the current administration within the coming months. Although unlikely to be a wholesale reversal of the DeVos changes, these are still likely to pose a serious threat to much of the progress brought about by their predecessor. Among other things, the proposed regulations would make it far more risky for universities to form relationships with non-legacy accreditors by raising the bar for how they can qualify to gain recognition from ED. They would also put a cap on the number of institutions a new accreditor can take on, hindering new entrants from gaining the momentum needed to stay afloat.

All of this represents a unique challenge that will have consequences for a number of parties within the world of higher education, perhaps most notably for the newer accreditors who are just starting to make strides toward ED recognition. Last week, Michael hosted a web event with the heads of three of these agencies to talk about the work they’re doing and see how they’re thinking about the future of their roles.

Anthony S. Bieda serves as the executive director of the National Association for Academic Excellence (NAAE), an agency that he started building just several months ago. In Bieda’s words, “NAAE will be the accreditor for institutions that want to be rewarded, encouraged, and nudged towards academic excellence, towards robust scholarship, and the ability to promote independent thinking, freely from any kind of doctrine or other political influences.” It is this standard of academic excellence that, in Bieda’s view, is absent from the goals of current accreditors and in need of fulfillment.

Stig Leschly takes a markedly different approach in his role as the president of the Postsecondary Commission. He aims to provide accreditation “for institutions that want to be recognized for and held accountable for doing extraordinary things for the economic opportunity of their students.” Throughout the event, Leschly emphasized the importance of universities providing their students with high returns on investment and how the Postsecondary Commission intends to reward institutions that generate the best results in this dimension.

Robert Manzer, the president of the American Academy for Liberal Education, aims to tackle a more narrowly tailored educational goal in his role as an accreditor, serving universities that specifically wish to advance the principles of liberal education. “Liberal education is the cornerstone of higher education,” Manzer said, “we believe that the disappearance of this notion has a lot to do with higher education’s sinking reputation and the perception of politicization that is so widespread.”

Manzer was particularly optimistic about the potential for inter-accreditor competition fostered by the 2019 regulations. “The opportunity,” he noted, “is to have accreditors that are actually interested in the quality of academics, the quality of academic programs, [and] the quality of the student outcomes.” This particular insight seemed to resonate with his co-panelists, who agreed that it’s high time to move beyond a one-size-fits-all solution to accreditation.

The debate over the primary goals of higher education is having something of a moment right now in the public sphere. Despite their organizations’ missions reflecting very different answers to this question, a shared attitude toward how the debate should be settled is perhaps the common thread joining my three guests together. Not only is there room for varying approaches regarding higher education’s aims, they might agree, but disagreement ought to be fostered among competitors. Only when universities are given the ability to freely pursue their aims will hundreds of flowers be able to bloom and consumers have the power to collectively decide which actors thrive.

Originally published by the American Institute for Economic Research. Republished with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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