As we read in this IHE story, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the approved federal accreditor for schools in the southeast, has just placed several schools on probation.The common thread is that the institutions show “financial instability.” Of course the administrators know when they’re in financial difficulty and don’t need an accreditor to tell them that the problem needs attention. Placing a school on probation might weaken it further, if some prospective students shy away from an institution once they hear about the accreditation problem. It’s rather like the old practice of bleeding sick people in the belief that bad blood was the cause. All that bleeding did was to make the person weaker and less apt to recover. That’s the case here as well.