Here is a press release issued Tuesday by Secretary Spellings’ office, containing her remarks at a meeting in Washington.
She was fulsome in her praise for educational accreditation, saying for example that it “helps maintain public trust in higher education” and “it’s the primary safeguard for millions of students and billions of taxpayer dollars.”
I don’t think so. The wide variation in educational quality we find in the U.S. has virtually nothing to do with accreditation. For all the subsidies and government regulation, higher education is a functioning market. Some schools compete for top-notch, diligent students who are looking for educational challenges; others compete for disengaged kids who are interested in having a college degree because so many employers won’t consider hiring them without one. Accreditation does not cause the high standards in the former, nor does it prevent low standards in the latter.
If accreditation had never started, the higher education landscape would look just the same.
