Dissecting "Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policy Makers Can Do About It"

Alan Contreras, in this point of view (may require registration for access), pokes around in the American Council of Trustees and Alumni's recent report and finds that "[s]ome of what it contains is a helpful commentary on what doesn't work well in the accreditation process. But some is irrelevant or misinformed."

Many states don't require that colleges earn accreditation. In California, for instance, you do not even need to have attended an accredited institution to be licensed as a lawyer or psychologist. As of 2006, California had 179 unaccredited secular institutions that granted degrees; the estimated 250 religious colleges in the state are on top of that. Florida, as another example, had 35 unaccredited, secular degree-granting institutions in 2007.

The worst are the so-called Seven Sorry Sisters, the states with such awful oversight of college quality that they are considered havens for diploma mills. The actual number in the group varies, depending on which states have the worst standards or oversight at a given time; the current Sisters are Alabama, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, New Mexico, and either Missouri or Wyoming, depending on which way the political winds blow at the moment. Indeed, in several of those states, operators of substandard colleges are major political players whose goal is to make sure that the states never have genuine, enforceable standards.