Who Are Accreditors and What Do They Want?
If you’ve ever seen an episode of Scooby Doo, you’ve seen every episode of Scooby Doo. The gang stumbles across the villain-of-the-week, they split up, Velma loses her glasses, Shaggy and Scooby run straight into the villain, a chase ensues, they corner the villain, somebody yanks off the mask, and the terrifying phantom turns out to be Old Man Jenkins from the first scene. Lately, higher education accreditation has been getting the full villain-of-the-week treatment. Depending on who you ask, accreditation is either an essential safeguard for students or an outdated system standing in the way of innovation. In recent years, it has become a lightning rod in debates over higher education, federal oversight, academic freedom, institutional accountability, and the future of federal financial aid. Like most institutions that have existed for more than a century, accreditation has its flaws. But before deciding whether it should be reformed, replaced, or defended, it’s worth asking a simpler question: Who are accreditors, and what do they actually do? What many don’t realize is that if you pull the villain mask off of the accreditation process, underneath, you’ll find a semi-retired faculty member who spent her weekend reading a 100-300-page self-study (unpaid) and supporting documentation because she believes an academic credential should mean something.
None of this suggests accreditation is beyond criticism. Peer review can be inconsistent. Standards can become overly complex. Compliance activities sometimes expand beyond what institutions believe adds value. Reasonable people disagree about how accreditation should evolve in a rapidly changing higher education landscape. Some of the concerns expressed recently deserve a closer look, a chance to remove another mask. Let's take them one at a time.
Concern #1: Accreditors dictate what institutions teach.
The historical and legal record tells a more nuanced story once you read the actual rules, all of which are conveniently published and readily accessible. Federal law protects curriculum from government control. The Department of Education Organization Act prohibits federal officials from exercising any direction or control over any institution's curriculum, instruction, administration, or personnel. The Higher Education Act goes further, requiring that accreditors respect each institution's stated mission (including religious missions) when applying their standards. Now, some professions do require that programs teach certain topics, like a nursing program requiring students to take an anatomy and physiology course because a core understanding of the human body is (we can all agree) vital. But the way this curriculum is framed, taught, or delivered is not dictated by any regulation or standard.
Accreditors' own governing documents say the same thing. A Century Foundation review of 56 accrediting agencies' standards found that accreditors overwhelmingly expect institutions to keep academic decisions where they belong: with faculty and institutional leadership, insulated from outside pressure. NECHE's standards, for example, place responsibility for curriculum content and quality squarely with qualified faculty, not with the accreditor.
And here's the part that the typical narrative tends to always skip. Historically, accreditors have been the ones defending institutions from ideological coercion. In 1941, Georgia's governor removed a university administrator for political reasons, and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools responded by removing accreditation from the state's public colleges after finding “gross political interference” given the lack of independent leadership expected of accredited institutions. Accreditors don’t tell institutions or their faculty how to achieve their mission or what to include in their curriculum. Instead, they act as a firewall, making it harder for anyone else to take that freedom away from the leadership and faculty who should be leading this process.
Concern #2: Accreditation is just an opportunity to make money.
Accrediting agencies are private, nonprofit organizations, funded primarily by annual dues and review fees that support their operations, peer review activities, training, and compliance with external recognition requirements (e.g., ED, CHEA, ISO 9001). There are no shareholders. There are no dividends. Their tax filings are public documents. You can look up any accreditor's Form 990 right now and see budgets that would make a mid-sized regional bank chuckle. If higher education accreditation is a get-rich scheme, it is, frankly, the worst one ever devised. It's a business model that consists of charging modest dues to review thousands of pages of documents and ensure ongoing compliance with established standards.
Concern #3: Accreditors are the “villains” of higher education.
One of accreditation’s defining characteristics is that it is largely carried out by peer volunteers rather than regulators. Site visitors are typically faculty members, deans, department heads, financial officers, registrars, and other higher education professionals who volunteer their expertise and time to evaluate institutions against published, agreed-upon standards, because they care about higher education and they understand its importance within a functioning society. The accreditation process is one based on peer review. The people evaluating your institution understand what you do because it's the job they also do every day. Nobody volunteers for a peer review team for glamour, power, or the airport Marriott loyalty points. They do it because they've spent their careers in higher education and feel a duty to protect its integrity. When a reviewer pushes your team on whether your learning outcomes are actually being assessed, that's not bureaucratic joy. That's a colleague who wants your students to get what they were promised for the time and money they’ve invested.
Concern #4: Accreditors want to control access to financial aid.
This is our favorite myth because the historical record shows precisely the opposite. Accreditation began in the 1880s as institutions voluntarily held each other accountable. Then came the 1944 GI Bill, a transformational law with one unforeseen side effect: nearly 6,000 schools sprang up to access veterans' benefits, many of them creating fake expenditure data, overcharging for learning resources, and offering worthless programs that took advantage of a vulnerable population.
Congress needed a fraud filter, fast. Lawmakers knew that building a federal quality-review framework from scratch would be expensive and politically unpalatable, so they looked around, saw a functioning peer-review system that already existed, and drafted it into service, first for GI Bill funds in 1952, then for all federal student aid under the Higher Education Act of 1965. Accreditors didn't lobby for this federal financial aid gatekeeping job. This enormous burden was forced on them, and, because they cared about students and higher education, they took on this responsibility. A role that now draws scrutiny instead of collaborative and meaningful reform. Congress did not create accreditation to monitor its distributions of federal financial aid. Rather, it relied upon an existing peer-review system that had already developed over decades. What began as a voluntary quality assurance framework for accountability among peers became the mechanism Congress chose to help distinguish legitimate institutions from fraudulent ones for the purposes of processing student loans.
Since 1965, accreditors have been anything but unsupervised. Many accreditors, those who serve as gatekeepers to Title IV funding, answer to federal recognition criteria spanning dozens of regulatory requirements, undergo periodic review by the US Department of Education (ED) and its advisory committee (NACIQI), and many also voluntarily undergo CHEA's separate recognition process or other third-party recognition standards. The watchers are watched, thoroughly, repeatedly, and on the record.
Good Systems Invite Scrutiny.
Accreditation is not the same thing as educational quality, nor does it guarantee institutional success. Institutions can be accredited and still struggle. Accreditors can make mistakes. Standards can (and should) evolve as higher education changes. But before dismantling or dramatically reshaping a system that has served as the primary framework for quality assurance for more than a century, there needs to be an honest understanding of what it actually does.
At its best, accreditation is not about protecting institutions or safeguarding bureaucracy. It is about preserving public trust, that when students invest their time, money, and aspirations in higher education, someone independent has asked difficult questions to verify and determine whether that promise can be kept. Accreditors want a degree or credential earned at one institution to carry the same weight as one earned across the country. They want a single mom spending her savings and her scarce evening hours pursuing a degree to actually gain the skills the catalog described. They want employers, licensing boards, and graduate schools to trust that "accredited" means somebody checked.
Good systems invite scrutiny. Accreditors should also continue to improve, just as they expect institutions to do. But improvements begin with a real understanding of current operations, not misconceptions. There are likely areas where processes can be streamlined, or where close collaboration with institutions can provide insights into the burden certain standards bring. No one is saying that accreditation is perfect or cannot be improved, but when you serve a population of learners who often face challenges when pursuing higher education, an independent system of checks provides valuable assurances.
Are accreditation processes demanding? Absolutely (and they should be!) Are they tedious? Sometimes (depending on an institution’s preparedness). But a credential that nobody rigorously verifies is just a rumor with a seal on it. The people insisting on evidence, outcomes, and follow-through aren't obstacles to higher education's excellence. They're among the only people systematically guarding it.
Truthfully, if higher education really were a Scooby Doo episode, accreditors were never the villains; they're the meddling kids. They're the ones asking inconvenient questions, checking behind the bookcases, losing their glasses, and refusing to accept that the abandoned amusement park is "probably fine."
So, the next time you hear about the villainous accreditors haunting every campus, do what the gang would do: investigate. You'll find educators (again, mostly volunteers) who took on a thankless federal responsibility that they never requested, operate under layers of oversight, and keep showing up anyway because they believe students and the public deserve assurances of quality.
And if you're preparing to face your own (highly regulated, well-meaning, thoroughly human, occasionally meddling) review team, you know where to find us.
