With a holiday week and the start of summer, the higher ed news tends to slow down a little, so this week’s issue focuses on just one story. The Department of Education reached consensus on its accreditation overhaul last week. While most of the coverage has lined up to argue about federal overreach, the angle that caught my attention was sitting in the department's own framing of accreditation as a marketplace it wants to make more competitive. From there, we’ll close with three Sparks.  

A quick programming note. The HEat Index will be taking next week off, but we’ll be back in your inboxes in two weeks! 

Accreditation Overhaul 

From Trump’s Accreditation Overhaul Advances 

After four days of contentious negotiation, the Department of Education's accreditation committee reached consensus on the slate of proposed changes, and ED can now move toward a final rule. 

Our Thoughts  

The Department of Education reached consensus on its accreditation overhaul last week, and the coverage has mostly been what you'd expect: federal overreach, the politicization of quality assurance, institutional autonomy under threat. All of that is worth paying attention to, but since every higher education writer is reporting on it this week, I wasn't sure I had much to add to it. Then I read New America's interview with Antoinette Flores, and one phrase she used sent me back to the department's own language with a different question in mind. ED keeps describing what it wants as more competition in the accreditation marketplace. So, if I take the department at its word, that leaves me with a question—if accreditation is a market the department wants to make more competitive, what exactly is the competitive feature being sold? 

To answer that, let’s break down what ED wants to do. Its stated goals include ending the moratorium on new accreditors, speeding up recognition so new ones can enter the field faster, and making it easier for institutions to switch to an accreditor that, in ED's words, "better aligns with their mission and values." That sounds an awful lot like accreditor shopping, the same way someone might shop for a wedding venue, gym, or therapist as they try to find the one that matches their vision or values. The challenge with this approach is that accreditors aren’t vendors you shop for on the basis of fit. They are gatekeepers to roughly $120 billion in annual federal financial aid, and their whole function is to say no when an institution isn't meeting the standard. When you introduce competition into that relationship, the feature an institution shops for is leniency; an accreditor that "aligns with your values" in a competitive market is, in plainer terms, one less likely to sanction you. That isn't a market for quality. It's more likely a race to the bottom of quality.  

I don’t want to pretend that the current system is perfect, because it isn’t. Flores notes that ED has framed the field as stagnant and resistant to innovation, and anyone who has participated in a self-study knows the process doesn't always track the thing it claims to measure. Some of that critique is fair. However, Flores also points out that there’s a reason why the accreditation process is the way it is. The reason why institutions are not allowed to simply switch accreditors is that schools facing sanctions or investigation have historically just gone and found a new accrediting agency to escape oversight. We add friction to this process to help ensure quality and to keep failing institutions from further harming students.  

We have spent issue after issue circling the same underlying problem: the public is no longer confident that a degree verifies what it says it does. Danny Liu's business leaders back in Issue 100 told him they don't know if they can trust universities anymore. The Yale trust report in Issue 103 was an entire institution trying to work out how to rebuild credibility. ASU's chatbot in Issue 105 was a case study in dismantling our own value proposition for the sake of efficiency. Accreditation is the one mechanism in the entire system whose specific job is to certify that the credential means something; it's the backstop standing behind all the other backstops. If we turn that into a marketplace where the competitive advantage is a more permissive standard, we aren't strengthening quality assurance. Instead, we're removing one of the last things that verifies the degree at the precise moment the public has started questioning aloud whether it's verified at all. 

When Florida first mandated accreditor shopping in 2022, Matt Reed warned in Inside Higher Ed that forcing accreditors to compete with one another would set off a potential race to the bottom. Since regional accreditors had long been monopolies grounded in peer review, and a college that feared a poor showing couldn't just go find a friendlier reviewer, those two traits held each other in check. What ED is proposing now goes further than that 2022 version did, letting a sanctioned institution switch with near-automatic approval, which makes Reed's warning feel even more important. The department is selling this as competition, but competition only improves a product in the markets where competition belongs, where the person doing the choosing is the one who has to live with the result. Accreditation isn't that kind of market. The institution picks its accreditor, but the people accreditation exists to protect, the students and the families paying the bills, don't get a vote, and when the buyer is chasing the easiest path, the ones who lose are the ones who were never in the market to begin with. We understand this everywhere else the stakes run high enough, which is exactly why a degree is supposed to work like the grade stamped on a cut of meat or the seal on a bag of organic apples. I see the seal, and I trust the standard was met without driving out to inspect the farm myself, and that trust is the whole point of the seal. Let the farm choose which inspector grades it, and the seal stops meaning anything to the person it was meant for. That's what we're being asked to accept here—that the way to rebuild confidence in a degree is to let the institutions granting it pick the judges least likely to ask whether it was earned. 

Sparks 

• Why College Degrees Matter in the Age of AI (EdSurge)- Rita Finkel, co-president of the Armory Foundation, makes the case that a degree is still worth the investment because it teaches you to think critically. As the value of higher education keeps getting questioned, I like keeping pieces like this one around as a reminder of why it's still worth it.
• How Our Growth-Obsessed Universities Spiraled Out of Control (The Chronicle Of Higher Education) - Brian Rosenberg offers a historical overview of how our sprawling modern universities came to be. If you want to understand or argue for or against a change at your institution, it helps to know how the sector got into its current shape in the first place.
• Graduation Speakers on Musicals, Humiliation and, Yes, AI (Inside Higher Ed) - A roundup of some of the more memorable commencement speeches from this year. I'm including it because who doesn’t enjoy a little inspiration you head into summer.