It's a Wonderful Life (in Compliance)
If you've seen It's a Wonderful Life (and if you haven't, no shame; black and white movies are a tough sell these days), you probably remember the scene where George Bailey stands on a bridge, convinced his life has been a waste. He never got to travel the world. He never built anything grand. He spent decades doing small, thankless work that nobody seemed to notice, like approving loans, managing accounts, keeping the Building and Loan afloat while Mr. Potter, the town's ruthless, Scrooge-like banker, tried to swallow Bedford Falls whole.
If you work in higher education compliance, this feeling may not be wildly unfamiliar. You're probably not the one cutting ribbons on new buildings. You might not be the face of the glossy recruitment brochure. You're filing reports, chasing down documentation, explaining state authorization requirements to people who would rather talk about literally anything else, and making sure the institution doesn't accidentally enroll students from states where you're not authorized to operate. It's not glamorous. And on the hard days, it's easy to wonder: Does any of this actually matter? It does. More than you know.
Meet the George Baileys of Higher Ed
Every institution has them: the accreditation liaison who can recite standards in their sleep, the registrar maintaining the state authorization spreadsheet with terrifying precision, the faculty member dutifully entering assessment data semester after semester. There's the CFO making sure audits don't turn into disasters and the institutional effectiveness coordinator who somehow keeps all the KPI threads from unraveling. Their work doesn't make for a compelling TikTok, but they're the reason the brochure doesn't say "FORMERLY ACCREDITED" (side note: this is rhetorical; nobody’s brochure should actually say “Formerly Accredited”).
Welcome to Pottersville U
In It’s a Wonderful Life, George is ready to end it all when his guardian angel, Clarence, intervenes with an unusual approach: instead of talking George off the ledge, he shows him what Bedford Falls would look like if George had never been born. Without George's quiet, steady influence over the years, the town has become Pottersville—a neon-lit nightmare full of predatory businesses, shuttered shops, and broken communities. Everything George thought didn't matter turns out to have mattered enormously.
Consider us your Clarence for the day. Let's take a look at what your institution might look like without the compliance work that often goes unnoticed.
The trouble started small, or, at least, it seemed small at the time. Nobody was really tracking which states the institution was authorized to operate in, so when the marketing team ran a successful digital campaign that pulled in applicants from 38 states, everyone celebrated. Six months later, the cease-and-desist letters started arriving from one state after another. Then came the lawsuits from students in three states who'd enrolled in programs that, it turned out, the institution had no legal authority to offer. Their complaints went unanswered. Now, they want refunds and financial compensation. The lawyers are expensive.
Meanwhile, the academic programs look fine on paper, but nobody's actually been assessing whether students are learning what they should. The nursing students can't pass the NCLEX at rates anywhere close to the national average. It turns out the curriculum was never properly mapped to the exam competencies. The cybersecurity program promised "industry-ready skills," but graduates keep failing their certification exams because key content was never covered. Students are posting about it on Reddit. Employers have noticed.
Enrollment is down (partly because of the Reddit threads, partly because the marketing team made some student outcome claims that turned out to be...overly optimistic). The institution is now on the state attorney general's radar for misleading advertising. Two programs have been discontinued mid-cycle due to low enrollment, leaving students scrambling to find somewhere else to finish their degrees with credits that may or may not transfer. The registrar's office is drowning in transcript requests and transfer credit appeals, but they're short-staffed because three people quit last month. Nobody documented the processes before they left.
The finances aren't great either. The last audit surfaced some "significant deficiencies," and now the CFO spends most of her time in damage-control meetings instead of actual financial planning. There's no institutional effectiveness data to inform budget decisions, so cuts are being made based on gut instinct and whoever argues loudest during leadership team meetings. The IT department has been begging for a security upgrade for two years; last month, a data breach exposed thousands of student records. An inexperienced PR team was brought in to address the fact that the institution just landed on an accreditor's list reflecting a recent public negative action.
Oh, and about accreditation: the self-study was a patchwork of hastily assembled narratives and mostly missing exhibits. The site visit did not go well. The institution has been placed on probation, which means current students are panicking about whether their degrees will mean anything, and prospective students are going elsewhere. The institution was placed on heightened cash monitoring due to its poor financial performance. Financial aid is still flowing (for now), but everyone knows what happens if accreditation is lost entirely. The phrase "teach-out plan" has started appearing in administrative emails.
Student Services is overwhelmed. Advising caseloads are triple what they should be, so students aren't receiving the guidance they need to stay on track. Complaints pile up with no formal resolution process. The faculty senate is in open revolt over workload issues, and morale across the institution is somewhere between "grim" and "updating LinkedIn."
This is Pottersville U. It's chaotic, reactive, and ultimately unsustainable, and the people who prevent your institution from becoming just like it are doing so quietly and consistently.
The Ripple Effect You Never See
Here's the part of the movie that always gets me: George Bailey saved his brother Harry from drowning as a kid. Harry grew up to become a war hero who saved an entire transport of soldiers. George never knew. He couldn't see the downstream impact of one moment his action had decades earlier.
Your institution isn't Pottersville U, and that's not an accident. It's the result of countless small decisions, documented processes, and thankless hours of work that most people will never see or appreciate.
Maybe there's a first-generation student who qualified for financial aid because your financial aid office operated effectively and your compliance officer ensured your accreditation remained in good standing. She graduated, became a social worker, and has since helped hundreds of families. Maybe there's a nursing student who passed the NCLEX because your faculty mapped the curriculum to the competencies that actually matter. He's working in a rural ER now, and last month he caught a heart attack that everyone else missed. Maybe there's a graduate whose credentials were recognized by employers because someone kept state authorization current; she just got promoted to director of her department and hired three more graduates from your program. Maybe there's a student whose complaint was resolved fairly (because someone built a process for that), and he didn't drop out, earned his degree, and now runs a mentorship program for other students who almost gave up.
Even if you never meet these people, their successes, and the successes of everyone they go on to help, trace back to the work you did. Work that probably felt tedious, thankless, or invisible at the time.
You Probably Won't Get a Basket of Cash
At the end of It's a Wonderful Life, the whole town shows up at George's house with money and gratitude, ending in one of the most cathartic moments in cinema history. (If you don't tear up at "To my big brother George, the richest man in town," I don't know what to tell you.)
You probably won't get a crowd bursting through your office door with a basket of cash but consider this blog our version of that moment. We work alongside compliance and institutional professionals every day, and we know what it takes. We've seen the late nights before site visits, the meticulous spreadsheets, the patience required to explain state authorization for the fifteenth time. We know that this work is often invisible precisely because you're doing it well. When compliance is working, nobody notices. They only notice when it isn't.
So, here's what we want you to hear: the work you do matters. It's foundational. It's what makes everything else possible. The inspiring mission statements, the student success stories, the programs that change lives, none of it would exist (for long) without you.
To everyone doing the unglamorous, essential, absolutely critical work of keeping institutions compliant, sustainable, and student-ready: we see you. We appreciate you. And we're grateful to be in your corner.
Happy holidays from all of us at EduCred Services. May your documentation be complete, your audits be clean, and your self-studies be submitted on time. And if you need a Clarence, we’ll be here.
