Before 2008, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools had a reputation as an accreditor that allowed flexible standards for the burgeoning for-profit education industry, which has rapidly attracted both students and the federal grants and loan dollars they use to pay tuition.
But this week, the regional accreditor, which counts many of the largest for-profit education companies among its members, showed that it was serious about changing that reputation. On Wednesday, the commission announced that it had denied a request to transfer the accreditation of Dana College, a small, religiously affiliated college in Nebraska, to a group of private investors that had said it would buy the college and save it from financial ruin. The commission rejected a similar proposal for Rochester College, in Michigan, in February.
In Dana’s case, the commission’s decision effectively killed the proposed sale and prompted the college to announce that it would close this fall, displacing some 500 students and about 130 faculty and staff members. The college has agreements with the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Grand View University, in Iowa, that will allow seniors to complete their studies there, and nearly 30 institutions have announced that they are accepting transfer students from Dana.
Raj Kaji, president of the Dana Education Corporation, formed to buy the college, said in an interview Thursday he believed that “the current political climate has influenced decision making in this process.”
Pressure on Accreditor
The Higher Learning Commission’s action came two weeks after Sylvia Manning, president of the commission, was grilled by members of Congress over the organization’s decision to accredit American InterContinental University, a for-profit, online educator, despite a review that found “egregious” problems with credit-hour inflation at the institution.
In addition, the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Education had recommended late last year that the department consider limiting or removing the commission’s status as a federally approved accrediting agency because of the decision to approve American InterContinental.
Ms. Manning, a former chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago who has been president of the accrediting group since July 2008, said on Thursday that there was no connection between her appearance on Capitol Hill or the dispute over American InterContinental and the commission’s decision not to transfer Dana’s accreditation to private investors.
Instead, the commission denied the transfer because the corporation’s request did not meet the standards of a policy that has been in place since 2009, she said, one that deals with things that would have seemed unthinkable as part of an accreditation just 10 years ago, such as stock ownership in a liberal-arts college.
The new policy was necessary because of the increasing frequency with which struggling colleges are being bought up by for-profit entities, she said: “Accreditation was starting to look like a commodity.”
The commission’s approval of continuing accreditation after purchase of Waldorf College by a for-profit entity, in 2009, also occurred under the new policy, Ms. Manning said, but with several stipulations for how the institution would continue to meet the commission’s standards.
Focus on Mission Continuity
The new policy makes it clear that a corporation can’t simply buy a college for the name and then transform its character without more scrutiny from the commission, she said.
“There’s a huge problem when you accredit something that has 800 students in a small town in the Midwest and a few months later it has 10,000 students online. It’s not that that’s not something we wouldn’t accredit; it’s something we didn’t accredit.”
Prior to 2009, the commission approved several sales of struggling nonprofit colleges to for-profit companies, only to see them transformed into institutions that offer mostly online programs, such as Grand Canyon University and Ashford University.
Mr. Kaji said there was no intention to change Dana into an online college, only to double the enrollment at the residential campus. A letter from Mr. Kaji and three other leaders of the corporation said the commission had raised questions about the future governance of the college and a lack of higher-education experience among the corporation’s management.
In an e-mail, Ms. Manning said the “issue of online classes (including hybrid programs) was one among several issues identified” during a fact-finding visit to the college.
