“Our school is accredited.”
When people hear those words, they’re apt to think it means something like the Underwriters’ Laboratories (UL) seal of approval on appliances – a virtual guarantee that the school (college, university, high school, or whatever) has been subjected to careful scrutiny by experts and found to be of good quality. If only that were true.
The truth is that educational accreditation is not really about guaranteeing educational quality, as the Wall Street Journal revealed this week with an article about difficulties facing George Mason Law School.
Accrediting teams don’t do anything remotely akin to the sort of testing UL does. They don’t make any pretense of evaluating the soundness of the teaching, looking to see if coursework is appropriately rigorous, or inquiring about grading standards. Nor do accrediting agencies verify that students make academic progress during their years at a school.
What is it about, then?
Accreditation is given to schools that follow the accreditor’s formula. It has to have all the right sort of policies and statements in place. It has to have sufficient resources. The faculty members need to have the right credentials. None of that guarantees that a student will actually get a solid education, and it’s also possible that a student could get a solid education even if none of the accrediting standards were met.
And if an accrediting agency happens to have an ideological agenda, it can use its leverage to make institutions bow to it. This week, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Professor Gail Heriot of the University of San Diego Law School. She pointed out that the American Bar Association, which accredits law schools, has been pushing a “diversity” requirement. Schools that don’t have large enough quotas of students from certain groups find themselves under fire.
George Mason University’s law school is known to have a superb faculty and excellent facilities. Its graduates perform well on bar exams. Nevertheless, when the ABA examined the school for re-accreditation in 2000, it was most displeased. While GMU made an active effort to recruit minority students, only 6.5% of its entering students were. The ABA castigated the school and refused to renew its accreditation because it was “unwilling to engage in any significant preferential affirmative action admissions program.”
That is to say, GMU wouldn’t lower its standards just to change the ethnic mix of its student body. The school did intensify its minority recruitment efforts, but that wasn’t enough. Eventually, under continuing pressure from the ABA, it lowered its admissions standards. Minority representation went up, but still not fast enough for the ABA. When the ABA did finally reaccredit the school in 2006, it warned that it would keep a careful eye on GMU’s diversity in the next accreditation round.
Isolated instance? No. Heriot cites evidence that this kind of pressure is widespread among law schools.
It is also true that the accreditation agencies that pass judgment on colleges and universities sometimes use their leverage to try bullying schools into conformity with their ideological views. Back in the mid-90s, there was a famous dust-up over the attempt by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges to compel a small Catholic college to change its curriculum. And a professor at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania told me that the accreditation team that assessed his school completely overlooked what he called its “clear academic shortcomings” to focus its attention on the really glaring flaw – not enough diversity on the faculty and in the student body.
Maybe this is easy to understand. After all, evaluating educational quality is very difficult, but counting people by race is simple.
If accrediting agencies want people to take them seriously, however, they should abandon the idea that a school can be a worthwhile institution only if it makes its admission and hiring decisions with quotas in mind.