Senators Say Accreditors Are Ineffective and Beset by Conflicts of Interest

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Key U.S. senators raised doubts about higher-education accreditation at a hearing on Thursday, citing the system’s “conflicts of interest” and its lack of “bright line” standards for judging colleges.

They wanted to know why so few colleges lose accreditation each year, and they questioned whether accreditors were doing enough to ensure institutional quality and accommodate innovation. And while they stopped short of calling for a complete overhaul of accreditation, they agreed the system needs updating.

Most of the senators’ concerns have been raised before, in other forums and by other speakers. But the voicing of those concerns by lawmakers who oversee federal higher-education policy suggests that accreditation will remain a focus in the pending reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the Senate education committee, questioned the standards set by the system, noting that only four institutions—out of 7,000—lost their regional accreditation in 2010-11.

“That either means that 6,996 are doing a great job, or our standards are too low,” he said.

But he was less critical than at past education-committee hearings, where he blasted accreditors for failing to root out fraud at for-profit institutions and called the system “rife with conflict.”

Conflicts of Interest

The biggest skeptic on the panel was Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a longtime consumer advocate. She argued that with “a few key pieces of data,” such as graduation and default rates, it would be possible for accreditors to separate the good colleges from the bad.

“Shouldn’t there be a bright line beyond which we say a school should not be accredited?” she asked.

Witnesses at the hearing pushed back against the idea, arguing that a single standard would fail to account for differences in institutional demographics and mission. As Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, put it, “bright lines are tough.”

“If we have 50-percent graduation as a bright line, then we just closed every community college in the United States,” he said.

But Ms. Warren was not satisfied. “Fair enough,” she replied. “But is there no number? Twenty-five percent? Five percent? One percent?”

Daniel J. Phelan, president of Jackson College, a community college in Michigan, responded that accreditors needed the flexibility to consider “unique circumstances.” It would be inappropriate, he argued, to apply the same standard to a community college in central Chicago as to one in rural Kansas. A better solution, he said, would be for accreditors to become more transparent about student outcomes.

“Let students and parents decide, and they’ll vote with their feet,” he said.

Senator Warren also raised concerns about “conflicts of interest” in the accreditation process, noting that its peer-review system is financed by member colleges and staffed by volunteers from peer institutions. At one point, she asked whether accreditors would be willing to be tough on colleges when their very existence depends on them.

If accreditors “crack down on poor-performing schools, at least some schools are going to complain bitterly,” she said. “It worries me because the conflicts we saw in the ratings and financial-services system” were “a key factor in bringing down our economic system” in the financial crisis of 2008.

Questions of Burden

Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the committee’s top Republican and a former college president himself, argued that the peer-review system was fundamentally sound, if overburdened with federal requirements.

“Academic people are independent, shall we say,” he said with a chuckle. “When they arrive on your campus, they’re not going to give you a pass. They are skeptics by nature, and they take some delight in catching somebody not doing something as well as they do.”

The process, he added, “is more often adversarial than collegial.”

At several points during the hearing, he described his frustration at being ordered by accreditors to construct a new law building at the University of Tennessee when he led the institution.

Mr. Alexander focused instead on questions of burden, asking panelists whether federal requirements distracted accreditors from a focus on institutional quality. Ralph A. Wolff, the recently retired president of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, suggested a “risk-based” approach to accreditation, where established and successful institutions would be exempt from some oversight.

But even Mr. Alexander expressed doubts about the current system, questioning whether accreditors could serve two purposes that sometimes competed: institutional improvement (colleges’ focus) and quality control (the government’s).

“It seems to me that accreditation is not a perfect fit for what the federal government needs done,” he said. “You want to focus on self-improvement, and we want to ensure we’re not wasting taxpayer money.”

Echoing Ms. Warren’s earlier comments, he asked whether there ought to be “some level below which institutions shouldn’t be accredited.”

Hating the Rating

One issue everyone at the hearing agreed on was President Obama’s plan to rate colleges: They all hate it. Even Mr. Harkin, an Obama ally, said he worried it could lead to “death spirals,” with institutions that received poor ratings losing federal aid and then finding it even harder to improve.

Mr. Harkin said he attended a recent White House-sponsored forum on the ratings plan at the University of Northern Iowa, and “boy did I get an earful.”

“That really impacted my thinking on this,” he said, adding that speakers had raised issues “I had not thought about before.”

Laura R. King, executive director of the Council on Education for Public Health, a specialized accreditor, said the Education Department already makes errors in the data it posts about accreditation status. “How is it going to do with high-stakes data?” she wondered.

Mr. Alexander agreed. “The idea of the federal government ranking colleges,” he said, “is well beyond the capacity of any sort of national school board.”