Barmak Nassirian, director of Federal Relations and Policy Analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, says accreditors are “confused by questions of academic quality.”
“Education does not systematically examine accreditor sanction data that could help identify insufficient accreditor oversight and thereby reduce potential risk to students and federal funds,” concludes the Government Accountability Office report, titled “Higher Education: Education Should Strengthen Oversight of Schools and Accreditors.”
Department of Education officials shot back to the GAO during the course of its investigation that analyzing the sanction data “would be too time- and labor-intensive.”
“In particular, they state that to be of any value, an analysis of accreditor sanctions would have to examine the reasons behind the actions,” the GAO report states. “According to Education officials who oversee accreditors, the department does not have the resources to undertake this effort.”
But reviewing such data could help the department identify which institutions from among the more than 6,000 that participate in federal student aid programs should be among the 300 that the department reviews each year, states the GAO report released late Monday.
Currently, accreditors tend to clamp down on institutions with poor financial health as opposed to those with poor academic outcomes, the report found. The law forbids the Education Department from telling accreditors how to assess academic quality.
Specifically, the report says that schools with weak academic outcomes were “no more likely to have been sanctioned by accreditors than schools with stronger student outcomes.” Conversely, the report found that accreditors “were more likely to have sanctioned schools with weaker financial characteristics than those with stronger ones.”
