Why are six private corporations the gatekeepers of billions of dollars of federal education funding annually? ACTA advocates for reforms to help America's colleges and universities ensure that future generations can access a high-quality education at an affordable price.
Skyrocketing college costs and employers’ increasing skepticism of the job readiness of recent graduates are testaments to a failing quality assurance system. Accreditation has become an opaque, systemically flawed process that stifles innovation. It does little to ensure that institutions are able to produce the educational outcomes they define as their mission. ACTA educates policymakers, trustees, and consumers about the shortcomings of accreditation, and advocates for solutions to protect students and taxpayers more effectively.
For nearly two decades, ACTA has documented the shortcomings of the accreditation system: its inability to guarantee educational quality, as well as its tendency to interfere with and inhibit effective governance by trustees. As accreditation reform gains bipartisan support, with stakeholders across the aisle observing how the current system fails to uphold academic quality, ACTA has been forming a broad coalition to support commonsense changes to the Higher Education Act. These reforms include: ending the monopoly of regional accreditors over the institutions in their geographical areas, eliminating the “elastic clause” that allows accreditors to impose additional conditions to Title IV eligibility beyond Department of Education oversight, and establishing a more effective and reliable path to Title IV federal financial aid. Download the policymaker action plan to improve the quality and reduce the cost of a college degree by removing obstacles for institutions to implement meaningful change.
ACTA provides trustees with the information they need to navigate the accreditation landscape and to understand how the accreditation system can affect board governance. ACTA supports governing boards in resisting accreditor overreach and ensuring institutional autonomy.
The failure of accreditation, and its damaging impact on the cost and quality of higher education, remain hidden from the public. ACTA’s newspaper articles and public presentations remind those who depend on a reliable system of higher education quality assurance that reform is urgently needed. In 2018, Johns Hopkins University Press published the book Accreditation on the Edge: Challenging Quality Assurance in Higher Education to which ACTA contributed a chapter titled “Fixing a Broken Accreditation System: How to Bring Quality Assurance into the Twenty-First Century” to bring these issues to a wider audience. That same year, ACTA played a pivotal role in bringing to light—and ultimately defeating—proposed rule changes by one regional accreditor that would have curtailed the religious freedom of colleges and universities in 19 states.
Today, virtually all colleges and universities in the United States are accredited (sometimes by more than one accrediting body). Yet there is widespread—and justifiable—concern that college quality has been on a steady decline. And while accreditation may have been well-intended, it is no exaggeration to say that it is now the greatest barrier to innovation […]
When it comes to federal funding of higher education, the government’s approach to quality assurance and consumer protection is a public policy and regulatory failure by almost any measure. Protecting Students and Taxpayers discusses the failure of the higher education accreditation system to perform its intended purpose of ensuring academic quality. Instead, burdensome administrative requirements, […]
A powerful threat to intellectual and religious liberty is afoot. In a region embracing 19 states, including Colorado, colleges and universities are under the authority of a federally empowered agency that recently issued a draft protocol, giving itself the prerogative to decide whether a school sufficiently “ensures inclusive and equitable treatment of diverse populations.” By […]
In the past month, the American Bar Association has been hit with four lawsuits criticizing the way the association accredits and regulates law schools, but while experts are somewhat skeptical about the suits’ chances of success, many agree that the suits do get at least one thing right: The ABA’s approach to law schools is […]
Every six months or so, about 18 higher education experts plant themselves in a hotel conference room for three days to dig deep into the federal recognition of accrediting agencies. That recognition is more than an honorary status: It gives the agencies the authority to serve as the gatekeepers for more than $100 billion of […]
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Launched in 1995, we are the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.
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