… used to chronicle the antics of a university unit he called Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds.
As UD‘s said on this blog before, no one absorbs federal funds — and pockets them — better than for-profit colleges. They’re absolutely brilliant at taking tax money and then failing to educate and graduate students.
It’s an amazing enormous con, and you’d think the government would do something about it, and it will do something about it as soon as it can … I dunno… pull itself together to do something about it.
One thing our mainly clueless Education Department has noticed is that university accrediting bodies (federal money doesn’t start flowing to your investors until you get accredited) are jokes. If I paid them enough, accreditors would accredit my ass.
Robert Shireman, deputy under secretary for education, said in an April 28 speech to higher education regulators that he feared accreditors don’t have the “analytical firepower” they need to fairly assess the schools they oversee.
Likening the accreditors to credit rating agencies that gave top marks to underperforming securities in the financial crisis, Shireman said the school agencies have an “inherent conflict of interest,” as they are funded by the institutions they are meant to critique.
Fees to join [one such group], for example, start at $17,500, according to the group’s website. Annual dues include a $2,500 base, 50 cents per full-time-equivalent student and $75 per degree site.
In a recent letter, the Office of Inspector General
blasted [a large regional accreditor] for approving Career Education Corp.’s (CECO) American Intercontinental University despite expressing serious concerns about its credit hour structure. The letter, which echoes a December preliminary report, says the accreditor’s failure to define a credit hour–the basic measure of a class’s rigor–allows schools to inflate a course’s value, improperly designate full-time student status and over-award federal student loans. Two other regional accreditors were criticized on similar grounds last year, including the group that previously accredited American Intercontinental.
Analytical firepower. LOL.
June 4th, 2010 at 7:53AM
There was a time when accrediting bodies maintained a sharp focus on finances: was sufficient money going to instruction, library materials, etc. They also considered the number of administrators and their remuneration relative to the size of the institution. My institution was scorched ca. 20 years ago for excessive administration and neglect of the library. This did motivate the then-new president to throw some vice-presidents, assistant vice-presidents, sub-panjandrums, and associate gophers overboard, along with better funding for the library and a national recruiting strategy for faculty. The institution improved. By the time the new millennium arrived, however, our accrediting body had turned to happy-clappy “celebrations” of institutional success: forget the frikkin’ numbers, forget evidence of instructional effectiveness, forget just about anything that might cast a shadow on the claims made by our marketing materials. Unlike his predecessors, our sluggish leader Backslapper was allowed to substitute an extended press release for the serious self-studies of old. Conveniently, the head of the accrediting body’s visiting team was an old Backslapper buddy.
June 4th, 2010 at 2:53PM
The government did do something about it — it did everything possible to facilitate the absorption of federal funds by the for-profits. The connections between for-profit higher education and (particularly) Republican politicians has had scandalous results.
Accreditation has never been great, but bear in mind that it took a court decision (Armstrong) to force regional agencies to accredit for-profit colleges, and that (again) federal policy in the Reagan-Bush years further weakened accreditation.
U.S. Department of Education policy is problematic not just because of an underlying desire to help the for-profits, but also because it tends to focus on students rather than institutions — which sounds OK but is utterly at odds with how accreditation and state regulation operate.