Under federal law, only colleges that are accredited by a “recognized” accrediting agency are allowed to accept federal student aid money. That requirement (which goes back to 1952) was supposed to prevent students from wasting their government college benefits (initially only available to soldiers under the G.I. Bill, but later to almost everyone) on educational scams. Back then, the rule actually made sense, but over the decades, the educational standards at accredited institutions have so collapsed that it no longer means much.
A number of states are looking at doing as much as they can to improve accreditation. Owing to rule changes made during the Trump administration, schools are no longer required to stay with the traditional regional accrediting agency, but are free to shop around. In today’s Martin Center article, Jenna Robinson looks at efforts in North Carolina, Florida, and Texas.
As she writes, the NC bill has been temporarily shelved: “North Carolina’s bill has already come under fire from a local faculty group. Members of the North Carolina American Association of University Professors (AAUP) planned to protest the bill yesterday at the General Assembly. A flyer advertising the protest said the bill would ‘place university accreditation into partisan hands.’ In an email to local AAUP members, Jay M. Smith, who is president of the N.C. conference of the AAUP and a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, called SB 680 ‘hostile to our state.’ (The protest was postponed when the bill was pulled from the calendar.)”
That sounds typical of the leftist faculty at UNC. There is rather little difference among the federally recognized accreditors, and not one of them is politically partisan or hostile. The simple fact is that the UNC faculty hates it when the GOP legislature tries to play any role in the way the university system the taxpayers fund is run.