Report > Accreditation, Postsecondary Education
Should College Accreditation Be Replaced or Reformed?
By Andrew Gillen | February 25, 2025
Key findings
- Accreditation has two main roles. The first is “quality improvement.” This role focuses on helping colleges improve by using peer review to offer suggestions for improvements and to encourage the spread of best practices. The second role is “quality assurance.” This role focuses on holding colleges accountable for the funding they receive from taxpayers.
- There are a host of different types of problems with accreditation, including ones that are foundational, related to public choice, and operational.
- Accreditors, universities, think tanks, and governments all routinely express frustration with the system, indicating that most entities that participate or rely on accreditation don’t have faith in it. Analysts are widely critical too, with both progressive and conservative scholars offering remarkably similar critiques. Indeed, the strongest defenses of accreditation are variations of accreditation may be flawed, but the alternatives are even worse.
- One method of replacing accreditation would be for the federal government to take over the quality assurance role. This idea, most popular among progressives, is based on the notion that having the federal government essentially outsource higher education funding decisions to third parties is unnecessary and undesirable
- Another replacement for accreditation would be to remove accreditors’ gatekeeping role and rely on the free market to provide quality assurance.
- There are several reforms short of altogether replacing the current system that could plausibly improve accreditation. Note that these reforms focus on improving the quality assurance aspect of accreditation because that is where the public interest overlaps with accreditation. In contrast, the quality improvement role has no public policy implications and should therefore be left to the discretion of colleges and accreditors.
Introduction
On paper, the quality of American higher education is ensured by the program integrity triad, which consists of three legs—certification by the U.S. Department of Education (Department), authorization by a state agency, and accreditation. The conventional wisdom is that the Department evaluates colleges’ financial and administrative capabilities, states oversee consumer protection, and accreditors oversee academic quality.
Without the approval of all three legs of the triad, students cannot tap into the more than $100 billion in funding the federal government makes available each year through financial aid programs like Pell grants and student loans. Because students cannot use federal financial aid for a college that is not accredited, accreditors have “gatekeeping” authority over federal spending, and therefore have enormous power within higher education.
Yet there is widespread concern that accreditation is failing to ensure quality. Accreditors, colleges, federal and state governments, students, and parents are frustrated with various aspects of higher education, including accreditation. This paper explores accreditation’s problems and the potential remedies to address these problems, including both potential reforms to accreditation and potential replacements.
