College accreditation used to be a sleep-inducing topic, but when the accrediting bodies went “woke” and began pressuring schools to adhere to their leftist notions, that changed. The accreditors went from an occasional minor nuisance to a persistent headache.
The efforts by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to strong-arm some of the state schools in Florida has prompted a counterattack by the state, which recently filed suit arguing that the current accreditation system is illegal. I write about the suit and its implications in today’s Martin Center article.
First, how is it illegal? Florida’s argument is that by handing over to private bodies the responsibility for deciding what standards must be met in order to be eligible for federal student-aid money, Congress has unconstitutionally delegated its legislative authority. It’s a darned good argument and the Supreme Court has recently shown a renewed interest in confining the federal bureaucracies to just their proper functions under the Constitution. The case has a strong chance of success.
And what if it does succeed? Congress would need to rewrite the student-aid law so that it no longer delegates governmental authority to private organizations. My argument is that the best way of doing that would be to dispense with accreditation as a gatekeeper for student-aid money. It doesn’t work very well and has bad side effects. Instead, tell postsecondary-educational institutions that if they want to be able to accept federal money, they’ll have to commit to repaying it if the students they purport to education don’t.
With “skin in the game,” colleges would have much different incentives than they do today. They would have to rethink their current strategy of luring in as many students as possible and keeping them enrolled as long as possible, without regard to their educational advancement.