Why Accreditation Exists: A Q&A with Antoinette Flores

This analysis is part of Mythbusting Accreditation, a written and multimedia series from New America’s Education Policy program. It features insights from experts across multiple fields to cut through false narratives about a crucial higher education accountability system.

New America’s Jeremy Bauer-Wolf and Antoinette Flores sat down to discuss the contemporary criticism of accreditation and how the framework can be improved. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: College accreditation has entered the mediasphere in a way not seen in memory. Headlines about accreditors have become common. Politicians all the way up to the likes of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and President Donald Trump have attacked the system publicly, labeling it as woke and in step with the liberal agenda. 

But what are accreditors? In essence, they are the gatekeepers of federal financial aid. Accreditors assess colleges by their standards and determine whether those institutions should qualify for aid, which is an $120 billion annual funding stream.

But they’re not always portrayed accurately, either by policymakers, the press, and particularly right-of-line media. Welcome to Mythbusting Accreditation, a New America multimedia series where we’ll be discussing the truth of how accreditors and the system actually works.

I’m Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, investigations manager for New America’s Higher Education Policy program.

Today I’m speaking with my colleague Antoinette Flores, Director of Higher Education Accountability and Quality. Thanks for chatting with me today.

Antoinette Flores: Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Bauer-Wolf: Accreditation has been in the news a lot—talk to me a little bit about the system as we know it today and how that developed.

Flores: It’s incredibly important, because accreditation is essentially your consumer seal standard of approval that indicates to students and the public that a college is a worthwhile investment. And it is a requirement that a college must be accredited in order for their students to be eligible for federal grants and loans. 

It’s somewhat of an odd system. It is a system that long predates the advent of the federal financial aid system. It predates the Department of Education and many of the colleges that are in existence today. It was created by colleges in the 1800s as membership associations, and they were created to help set standards on things like admissions, length of study, curriculum. 

When Congress first created the very first aid programs, what was the first GI Bill, it resulted in a massive wave of fraud. Literally thousands of colleges sprung up overnight to take advantage of federal funds. So the second GI Bill, the very first Higher Education Act, and each of the reauthorizations since, required that a college must be accredited.

Congress’s goal was ensuring a basic level of quality, rooting out fraud in the delivery of aid, and basically answers the question: Is this college a worthwhile investment?

But there’s another reason, and it’s an important one. You wouldn’t necessarily want the federal government or any government setting standards on things like curriculum, what’s taught in the classroom. You’d want an independent entity, and who better than academics themselves?

Bauer-Wolf: We’re often hearing about accreditation from a critical lens—how much of that criticism is warranted?

Flores: I would say the criticism that we’re hearing in the news, things like accrediting agencies enforce ideological standards, is relatively new.

There is, though, widespread consensus that accreditation needs to change. One of the most common criticisms and a primary goal of reform across the political spectrum is that accrediting agencies need to do more to ensure that students are getting what they spend their hard-earned time and money on. There should be really no bad investments that are backed by a government-recognized seal of approval.

Accrediting agencies are required under the Higher Education Act to assess college quality on student achievement. That means things like, are students graduating? Are they getting jobs? Are they passing licensing exams that enable them to get a job where required? And are they earning enough money to pay down their debt? Some agencies set bright-line standards. So things like, 70 percent of your students have to graduate.

For others, what’s expected isn’t clear. And when, across the system students aren’t graduating, they aren’t able to repay their debt—that indicates that something isn’t quite right. Accrediting agencies are a big focus of that.

Bauer-Wolf: What are some ideas you have to improve the system?

Flores: The biggest change would need to be a greater focus on student outcomes and clear expectations about what that means. Over the last decade, many accrediting agencies have spent a lot of time investing in data, analyzing data, using data to drive improvement. 

But there is still this resistance to setting clear standards.So, for example, more than 20 percent of your graduates, more than 20 percent of your students must graduate. 

One of the challenges is that when you accredit an entire institution, if you make the determination that performance isn’t good enough, your option is to remove accreditation.

That is going to have a catastrophic effect for the school and the students that are enrolled. But where things are changing is that accountability is becoming much more tailored to focus at the individual program level.

That is one of the areas that will be a topic of discussion and a focus at the upcoming negotiated rulemaking. And when you look at individual programs, it makes it easier to target poor outcomes. The current administration wants to call for agencies to focus on student achievement at the programmatic level.

It’s likely to be met by resistance, but agencies are somewhat behind the curve in setting these kind of clear expectations and ensuring that students don’t have bad outcomes.

Bauer-Wolf: What else can we expect to see in negotiated rulemaking?

Flores: One big focus will be this issue of how to address student achievement. And that one has been a question that has been around for a long time and there’s a lot of agreement on it, regardless of political party. 

There are a number of other issues that are newer and that raise some concerns. For example, one of the things that the administration wants to do is eliminate any agency from having standards on diversity, equity, and inclusion. It also wants to create a new standard that accrediting agencies consider intellectual diversity. These are areas that start to get into issues of hiring, of enrollment and admissions, and of what’s taught in the classroom.

Those are really kind of red lines that you would want accrediting agencies to address and have standards on, not the federal government.