David Shankbone
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s recent decision to reinstate the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools is a betrayal of public trust. Acics, as it’s commonly known, accredits for-profit colleges. A stamp of approval from the group is a supposed guarantee of a college’s educational quality and institutional stability. Importantly, it also provides access to billions of federal financial aid dollars.
In the past, those dollars have been used to lure trusting students into for-profit college programs with abysmal graduation rates and job placements. Students have been duped by promises of federal grants that are too small to cover the spiralling and hidden costs of for-profit colleges. Years of mounting evidence of slick and aggressive recruitment tactics led to a 2012 Senate inquiry and report. Perhaps the most egregious offenders, Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech, spent more than $550 million in 2009 alone on their predatory marketing practices.
Work by advocacy groups such as the Project on Predatory Student Lending and the National Student Legal Defense Network revealed the extent of the false claims. Facing plummeting enrollments after their practices were exposed, Corinthian Colleges closed in 2015; ITT Tech closed the following year. But thousands of students of these national campus chains face their own bankruptcies from the debt of worthless courses and degrees.
Acics failed to intervene in these colleges’s predatory practices and lost their federal recognition in December 2016.
But DeVos, in spite of staff objections, has used a judicial technicality to temporarily restore Acics as a recognized accreditor until July 30. She refuses to consider her own agency’s 244-page, scathing analysis of Acics’ disregard for student protections and overall quality. In the meantime, the Department of Education has received more than 100,000 applications for student debt relief of hundreds of millions of dollars from the student victims of these predatory institutions.
DeVos’s department found that Acics failed to meet fifty-seven of ninety-three federal standards for quality control. That leaves just 38 percent of the standards met. Yet that was good enough for DeVos. A federal court had declared earlier that the termination order issued in 2016 did not follow appropriate judicial process; this was enough of a window for DeVos to advance her for-profit agenda.
The move to reinstate Asics is just the latest in Devos’s overall strategy, which is abandoning every safeguard for the low-income and vulnerable students who most need the benefits of a quality education.
To be sure, accreditation processes are not failsafe. But DeVos’s astonishing ignorance of educational policy and standards is all the more reason why a robust system of accreditation needs to be put into place.
DeVos’s astonishing ignorance of educational policy and standards is all the more reason why a robust system of accreditation needs to be put into place.
The students most impacted by DeVos’s decision include military veterans, immigrants, first-generation college students and students of color. For-profit colleges prey on these kinds of students, luring them in with over-inflated claims of program quality and post-graduation employment. The issue at hand is not simply letting the invisible hand of the market guide student-consumer choices—yet this is the logic DeVos has applied in her education work for decades.
“Choice” over quality is what matters to DeVos, as demonstrated by her long crusade to build the largest K-12 urban choice network in her home state of Michigan. She emphasized the free-market creed instead of assuring Detroit students and families that the schools they chose were trustworthy.
Elsewhere, students have languished in K-12 schools that continue to be publicly funded despite a failing record. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, birthplace of the modern private school choice movement, $139 million of public money was spent from 2004-2014 on fifty voucher schools that failed to meet requirements. These schools were eventually closed down, but not before failing to educate a decade’s worth of students.
American families place their trust in the idea that education brings desperately needed opportunities. Terms like “choice” and “accredited” sound reassuring, but as DeVos’s latest move reveals, they provide no guarantee at all.
Carole Trone is a Wisconsin-based writer and advocate for education access and success. Using experiences as parent, education nonprofit leader, and college instructor, she works to connect families and students to education insights that matter.