I have no doubt that the following blog will be controversial, but it is so important that I must permit the controversy to rage.  I read and agree with a recent piece in SeeThruEDU by George Leef, entitled “America’s Ridiculous Notion:  Accreditation is What Makes Colleges Good or Bad.” (http://seethruedu.com/americas-ridiculous-notion-accreditation-is-what-makes-colleges-good-or-bad)  The argument in the article is powerful and needs a wide audience.  The thrust of the argument is this:

“I often laugh when a sports team that is doing poorly reacts by firing the coach or general manager. They, of course, aren’t the people who are responsible for all the errors, strikeouts, wild pitches, and so on, but firing them seems the owner is doing something. That’s better than doing nothing, at least in the perception of the fans.  Here’s something even more ridiculous than firing the coach or GM in sports – punishing a college accrediting agency for the poor student results at schools it oversees. Accrediting agencies have even less control over how well students do in their coursework than coaches have over the performance of their players on the field. At least a coach can change his lineup. Accreditors can do nothing to motivate students to do better.”

Admittedly, I, like the author, am no great fan of accreditation, even though it has some benefits (not enough to offset its problems).  But, as Leef states, when students fail, we cannot blame the accrediting agency as our knee jerk reaction, just as we should not blame the university or (especially) the faculty.  Students are and ought to remain responsible for their education.  To punish everyone else except the student only incentivizes both bad actions by universities to “satisfy” Federal or state regulations or by students themselves who will increasingly view their educational challenges as someone else’s problems.  The latter then tends to cause universities, a double problem, to ease academic standards and even (in reported instances) to pressure faculty to make things easier and to give better grades for less work.

A university is not necessarily failing when it does not have an “acceptable” graduation rate.  Maybe the students were just not good enough academically and would have been better off dropping out or maybe they need to learn some hard lessons.  Instead we blame the accreditor (see article) or blame the faculty or the university generally.  That is a very dangerous trend for higher education.