Bill Would Increase Accreditation Transparency and Strengthen NACIQI

Last week, Reps. Lori Trahan, Madeleine Dean, and Jahana Hayes introduced the Accreditation Reform Act to strengthen the quality assurance system for colleges and universities. Accreditation is often a confusing and sometimes arcane process, which is why advocates for students have been fighting to increase transparency into how it works and strengthen protections for students and taxpayers from poor-performing institutions and weak accrediting agencies.

This bill would address some of those black-box problems and heighten expectations for the accreditors responsible for approving thousands of colleges to receive nearly $130 billion each year in taxpayer dollars. The changes would be made across the accreditation system, strengthening the independent review by National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) to provide a more rigorous oversight process, requiring better reporting from accrediting agencies on the actions they take and the reasons behind those actions, and ensuring public accountability by requiring that information to be posted on the Education Department’s website for access by the public.

NACIQI’s Seat at the Table

The Accreditation Reform Act would beef up NACIQI’s role in the accreditation space. NACIQI serves as an independent body that advises the Education Secretary on whether to recognize particular accrediting agencies and makes recommendations to improve accreditation and other institutional quality metrics. But too often, it has been relegated to a mere formality. To make matters worse, new regulations out of the Education Department will make it more challenging for NACIQI to provide its review independently, as document-gathering for accreditors’ applications will be increasingly controlled by the Education Department itself. This bill would reverse that trend, instead providing opportunities for NACIQI to be much more involved in the accreditation recognition process with the Department of Education -- even allowing NACIQI members to participate in Department site visits or make document requests for materials not provided to the committee. Greater involvement with accreditors and the recognition process should help ensure stronger, higher standards among accreditors.

Stronger Reviews of Accrediting Agencies

The bill would also ensure the Secretary herself conducts a comprehensive, data-informed review of accreditation agencies. The bill requires the Secretary to incorporate data and evidence already held by the Department--like the portfolio dashboards the Department has produced for NACIQI consideration in recent years, or other information about the colleges that fall within an accreditor’s approvals--into the recognition process, an important way to ensure accreditors are judged not just by standards they set for themselves, but by their actual results. It would ensure the public has access to agency documents before submitting public comments on that agency’s performance and fitness for recognition -- a needed improvement that has found its way into the courtroom in recent years. And the bill puts a particular emphasis on revisiting cases where accreditors seem to have fallen short -- namely, those that have been under some sort of investigation by state or federal law enforcement agencies for fraud or harm to students, and the kinds of precipitous closures, where colleges have closed without a teach-out agreement in place, that have left tens of thousands of students stranded in recent years, providing an extra look at accreditors with problematic outcomes at their institutions. Together, these provisions will ensure that the closest attention is paid to accreditors whose institutions have poor outcomes and who have left students the worst off, ensuring accrediting agencies serve the student protection role expected of them.

Shedding Some Light on Accreditors

Finally, the bill adds a provision that would increase transparency into the little-understood processes of accreditation and agency decisionmaking. Specifically, it would require that accreditors report--and the Education Department make available to the public--records related to the recognition of accrediting agencies, as well as final accreditation materials for colleges and universities. The real surprise is that most of this information is not already readily available to the public. Too often, students, their families, and policymakers are left in the dark about the quality and wellbeing of their colleges.

The accreditation system is a difficult one to understand, largely because so many of its parts happen in the shadows. The Accreditation Reform Act tries to change that with common-sense reforms and heightened transparency, bringing the strengths and weaknesses of the accreditation system to light, helping to hold accreditors accountable when they fall short, and ensuring that important information is readily available to the students who are making one of the most expensive and important decisions of their lives in going to college.