Accreditors Must Stop Letting Failing Colleges Off the Hook

Author Antoinette Flores discusses the shortcomings of college accreditors in assessing student outcomes, as well as solutions to ensure America’s higher education system is a generator of social and economic mobility.

If you’ve heard the criticisms of college accreditors, you may believe they fritter away all their time on superficial assessments—counting books in the library or checking faculty credentials, for example—while turning a blind eye to outcomes like low graduation rates and other weightier measures of an institution’s quality.

But that’s only half-true. Yes, accreditors do need to take student outcomes much more seriously. But they are closer to doing so than even many policy wonks realize.

The above excerpt was originally published in RealClearEducation. Click here to view the full article.

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