It is often said that American higher education is "the envy of the world." This is certainly true in areas such as science, medicine, engineering and other technical fields. It is also true with regard to access – the large percentage of the population that attends college.

But in some other respects, American higher education is less impressive.

Employers complain that graduates cannot write. "They can do the technicals," one said, "but they can’t write the memo." Yet not a single case has been reported of accreditors sanctioning a school on these grounds.

A Roper survey, described in the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s report, Losing America’s Memory, found that college seniors, even at top colleges, do not know American history. Only one-quarter could identify James Madison as the Father of the Constitution, George Washington as the victor at the battle of Yorktown, or the most famous words from the Gettysburg Address. It was not hard to locate one source of the problem: none of the colleges require American history for graduation. Yet they are all accredited.

Grade inflation is rampant, and is getting worse. Nothing is more essential to upholding quality and motivating academic achievement than giving honest grades. Another ACTA report, Degraded Currency: The Problem of Grade Inflation, summarizes current research on the topic. A comprehensive study by Columbia’s Arthur Levine and Jeannette Cureton, finds that the percentage of A’s has increased from 7 percent of all grades in 1969 to 26 percent by 1993. During the same time period, the C grades fell by 66 percent. The problem has grown worse since that time. Based on his ongoing study of grade inflation, Duke’s Stuart Rojstaczer reports that, "The rise has continued unabated at virtually every school for which data are available." To cite one particularly timely example, the Boston Globe recently reported that, in the last two years, the number of A’s and A minuses at Harvard actually increased from 46.4 percent to 47.8 percent. Every student graduates with honors who is not in the bottom 10 percent of his or her class. In spite of the pervasiveness of this problem, we are not aware of a single instance of a school being sanctioned by the accreditors for grade inflation. In fact, no case has been reported of the issue even having been raised by accreditors.

Probably the most important question about a college is: What are students studying and learning -- in short, what is the college curriculum? Most importantly: What courses are required for every student? Yet, there is massive evidence for the fact that, under the current accrediting system, the college curriculum has fallen apart.

ACTA’s new study, The Hollow Core, examines the general education offerings at 50 colleges and universities, including the Big Eight and Big Ten, the Ivy League, and the Seven Sisters. The study finds that college requirements have so many loopholes, students can often graduate without taking core subjects such as math, science, composition, literature, economics, or American history or government. Not one of the surveyed colleges requires a general course in economics. Only 12 percent mandate a general course in literature, while a mere 14 percent insist that their students study American history or government. Needless to say, all these colleges are accredited.

Instead of solid core requirements, many colleges now offer students a cafeteria–style menu of hundreds of often narrow and even odd courses. At various universities, the humanities requirement, which used to require broad courses such as History of Western Civilization, can be met by such narrow courses – these are all real examples -- as "History of Country Music," "Movie Criticism," or "Dracula." The literature requirement, once a survey of English literature, can now be met by such courses as "Quebec: Literature and Film in Translation" and "The Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Feminism, and Folklore." History requirements can be met by "History of College Football," "History of Visual Communication," or "Sexualities: From Perversity to Diversity."

Borrowing from Cole Porter, the Association of American College’s study, Integrity in the Curriculum, concluded that, as for what passes as a college curriculum, "Almost anything goes."

In theory, the accreditors should be the guardians of academic quality. In reality, it has taken enormous external pressure, including explicit Congressional directives, to persuade accreditors to address more directly issues of educational quality and student learning. In response, accreditors have added some general language like the following from the Middle States Association: "The kinds of courses and other educational experiences that should be included in general education are those which enhance the total intellectual growth of students, draw them into important new areas of intellectual experience, expand cultural awareness, and prepare them to make enlightened judgments outside as well as within their specialty." The North Central Association requires "a coherent general education requirement consistent with the institution’s mission and designed to ensure breadth of knowledge and to promote intellectual inquiry."

It is hardly surprising that, when the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education reviewed the criteria of the North Central Association, it found them devoid of any "specific measures to be met by institutions" and insufficient for distinguishing between compliance and non-compliance. Such criteria ensure that colleges will pay lip-service to sound educational goals, but not that they actually deliver a solid education to their students.

Few and far between are the examples of colleges whose accreditation has been denied on grounds of educational performance. As DePaul University’s David Justice writes, "The truth of the matter is that regional accrediting associations aren’t very good about sanctioning an institution for poor quality."

If the accreditors are lax when it comes to enforcing standards of educational quality, what demands are they placing on universities? The accrediting reports themselves are secret, but a review of accreditation problems reported over the last four years in The Chronicle of Higher Education found that – with only a few exceptions outlined below – all of the 47 U.S. colleges placed on probation were in trouble because of financial insolvency.

Yet, in this area, accreditors are largely redundant. The market has already rejected these institutions and is in the process of putting them out of business. Moreover, the financial health of institutions of higher learning is already certified by the U.S. Department of Education. No institution may receive federal funds until the Department verifies its eligibility and certifies its financial and administrative capacity. In addition, as the accreditors themselves admit, the bond-rating services establish financial viability on the basis of a more thorough review than accreditors.

Accreditors mainly focus, not on educational performance or results, but on a variety of inputs, including the number of books in the library, the credentials and demographics of the faculty, student credit hours, what percentage of students live on campus, how many courses are offered at night, and so forth. They seem especially interested in procedures – shared governance procedures, appointment and tenure procedures, grievance procedures, program review procedures, and so forth.

Former U.S. Senator Hank Brown, who recently served as President of the University of Northern Colorado, reports that the accreditors did not ask what the students were learning but focused mainly on whether the faculty was happy.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported last month that accreditors told the University of North Dakota governing board to drop the institution’s Indian-head logo and Fighting Sioux nickname.

The same accrediting agency evaluated the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and objected to the University’s mascot – Chief Illiniwek.

Currently, Auburn University’s accreditation is threatened primarily because the board of trustees is said to micromanage the athletic program. "None of the problems relate to education," reports The Chronicle.

One has to wonder whether challenging colleges over mascots and trustee involvement in athletics are what Congress envisioned when it gave accreditors the power to cut off a university’s federal funds. Yet these are the only reported cases of sanctions on non-financial grounds.

Accreditors talk about ensuring quality but, if we look at their track record, we have to ask: "Where’s the beef?"

What is the solution?

First, the ideal solution is to get the federal government of the accreditation business. Let private accreditors be private again. That worked fine before the federal government became involved and it will work fine again. If colleges want to be accredited, fine. If accreditors get out of line, as they sometimes do, the college can just drop them. Private accreditors would no longer have the power of the federal government behind them.

That does not mean that the federal government would have to become an accreditor. For the purposes of making sure that federal funds going only to bona fide colleges, a much simpler and less expensive procedure could be established. Colleges could be required to answer questions that demonstrated their legitimacy -- with penalties for fraudulent declarations. That should be sufficient to identify the institutions that are "colleges" in name only.

Second, there is a lively market in higher education. What college to attend is a decision that consumers take very seriously. Yet accreditation evaluates colleges and then keeps the evaluations secret. Useful information is being wasted. Massive data gathering occurs prior to an accreditation visit. Relevant parts of this data should be shared with the public. The College Consumer Profile envisioned in this bill is very promising in this regard.

Third, if accreditors have a poor record when it comes to ensuring quality, why not allow an alternative? There is an accountability revolution in higher education, but it does not come from the accreditors or from what is euphemistically called "the higher education community." It comes from the states – from Governors, legislators, state higher education commissions, boards of trustees, business leaders, and parents. Let me just give you two examples:

1. Trustees are appointed to represent the public interest and, with the assistance of ACTA, are becoming increasingly active and expert in overseeing quality. The City University of New York board of trustees raised admissions standards, removed remediation from the senior colleges, and now requires that students pass an independently administered examination before they move to upper-division course work. Boards of trustees in a number of states are taking proactive steps to demand more rigorous core requirements for their students. None of these improvements were the results of accreditors’ recommendations.

2. State higher education agencies – such as the Colorado Commission on Higher Education and the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia – are framing performance measures that look at educational results and not just inputs. Hank Brown, who became a college president after serving in the Congress, reports that, while the accreditors did not ask questions about what students were learning, one agency did – the Colorado Commission on Higher Education. Meanwhile, Virginia’s State Council now collects and annually releases the results of institution-based assessments of student learning to help ensure academic quality.

The regional accrediting associations function as de facto cartels. Monopolies are not good at self-correction. The best medicine is competition. Whereas accreditors have shown great reluctance to become meaningfully involved in educational standards and student learning, the states have shown an intense interest in making sure their colleges and universities provide a first-rate education to all their citizens. The money is coming out of their pockets, in taxes and tuition, and it is their kids who are being educated – or failing to be educated. The original Higher Education Act allowed states, if they so chose, to provide an alternative to accreditors. About ten years ago, this option was arbitrarily deleted. Now only New York has this right. H.R. 4283 wisely restores this option for any state that wishes to exercise it.

ACTA believes that eliminating this arbitrary restriction and allowing all states the option of providing accreditation to institutions within their states would provide several benefits:

1. Every state already has some mechanism for certifying institutions of higher education operating within their states. The states are competent to do the job of accreditation and might do it better. In recent years, state governments have made considerable efforts to improve accountability, reward performance, focus on outputs not just inputs, and achieve greater cost-efficiency.

2. The states are accountable to the voters and the taxpayers. The regional accreditation associations are accountable to their own members, namely, the universities they accredit.

3. Colleges and universities that feel they are being treated in unfair and arbitrary ways by accreditors should have recourse to a legitimate alternative. Absolute power corrupts.

4. There is little incentive for the regional accreditors to improve so long as they have a monopoly. Competition, even the possibility of competition, can be very effective in motivating reform.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni would like to thank the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for addressing these issues thoughtfully, candidly, and boldly on behalf of the students and parents of America.