Why is Harvard accredited anyway?
By Pastilla Negra
Harvard and the Trump administration are in conflict once again. Harvard has defied demands for information about foreign students, and the administration has responded by withdrawing the authorization for Harvard to, in effect, provide visas to international students. Harvard has of course sued, claiming it has the right to decide who can come into the US on student visas. But, providing visas to international students is a privilege, not a right. This phrase is often thrown around, sometimes inappropriately, but in this case it fits perfectly. Only institutions that have passed a private certification, making them “accredited,” can qualify for this privilege. Thus, the privilege of issuing student visas is one of many ways that the federal government tilts the playing field in favor of legacy institutions at the expense of disruptive innovators who might challenge the politically homogenous and increasingly anti-intellectual environment in higher education.
New institutions, including ones that lack Harvard’s history of working around and openly violating civil rights laws in the US, do not have this privilege. This point is not hypothetical; committed higher education reformers are currently setting up new institutions, like the University of Austin, which not only follows civil rights law, but also has introduced fair and extremely transparent admissions criteria. These policies are in stark contrast to the “holistic” admission policies used by legacy institutions, with their heavy dose of DEI-based preferences, which, for example, systematically labeled Asian-American applicants as having bad personalities to justify holding them to far higher academic standards than other groups of students.
But, these new institutions do not have the privilege of issuing student visas (or seeking federal funds to support research) because they are not yet accredited, while Harvard is. Why does, for example, UATX not have accreditation with the federal government, while universities that have ostentatiously violated federal law by engaging in blatant racial discrimination (not to mention becoming partisan political actors) maintain this important certification? Shouldn’t adhering to federal law be the most basic criteria for being “accredited” for the purpose of being allowed to provide student visas and obtaining federal funds?
What has happened is that the federal government has outsourced this important certification to private actors, largely controlled by the legacy universities themselves. Not only do these accrediting agencies not hold adherence to federal law as a major criteria for accreditation, many of them go in the opposite direction, demanding DEI efforts that seek to violate or work around civil rights protections that apply to universities. Further, this outsourcing of accreditation allows existing institutions to develop criteria that makes it impossible for new entrants to compete on equal footing with legacy institutions.
Many, even on the right, who see the problems with the excesses of academia still express great concern about the administration’s efforts to force change, hoping instead for private solutions and competition to step up and solve these problems. But, as the international student issue illustrates, we actually have a system where the government, through accreditation, puts a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of corrupt, incumbent institutions at the expense of those that wish to bring new ideas into the higher education space. At a minimum, new institutions, without a history of flouting federal law and taking extreme political positions, should be on an even playing field with these incumbents.
Instead of banning new institutions from seeking federal funds and admitting international students, there should be uniform criteria applied to all higher education institutions. For example, the federal government could implement the following policies:
An across the board cap of 15% on international students at the undergraduate level—institutions supported by the federal government should serve America and Americans first, but part of serving America is to bring the best and the brightest here. This cap balances those two objectives and is certainly within the rights of the federal government to impose; the right to admit international students is effectively a right to issue visas, which is ultimately a function of the federal government. Further, such a cap eliminates one of the big worries that has led to the accreditation requirement; that people will set up institutions simply to be visa mills. By requiring that these institutions primarily serve American’s in good faith, we will not see visa mills popping up.
A requirement that every institution that seeks to admit international students or federal funding not be in violation or have a history of violating civil rights laws with respect to hiring or admission. We simply cannot outsource key decisions about who gets to enter the United States to institutions which flaunt the laws of the United States. The costs of allowing this outsourcing can be seen by the dreadful treatment of Jewish students at Columbia and many other legacy institutions that have carte blanche to hand out visas.
A safe-harbor provision for transparent admissions. If you can clearly and briefly explain your entire admission policy, and that policy clearly does not discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics, then accreditation on this dimension should be automatic.
All universities should be subject to the same minimum quality test for being allowed to issue visas. Certainly, a new university that is simply a diploma mill, with no admission standards for Americans, should not be able to live off the 15% international students. But, existing institutions can just as easily turn into diploma mills, so whatever minimum standardized test score or job outcome criteria that should be used for new institutions should be applied to all institutions. Those institutions in a very early stage, where employment outcomes cannot be measured yet, should get forbearance as long as their admission criteria are sufficiently transparent and rigorous.
These straightforward criteria for “accreditation” would be an obvious improvement over the Byzantine system that currently favors incumbents and could open up space for more experiments that challenge the entrenched academic culture.
Higher education is in crisis. The debate rages about the role of government in solving the problems that we can see clearly with these institutions. But, it should be beyond debate that the government should not actively disadvantage those institutions that are trying hardest to restore higher education to its true mission. The rearguard actions by legacy institutions to maintain their unearned and undeserved privileges should be seen as acts of transparent self-interest, not brave principled stands against outside interference.
Good essay. I am a retired business school professor. My Dean and other administrators loved jumping through the hoops of accreditation. They like hoops and checking off boxes as ways to validate their work and avoid thinking of Big Questions-- that's one reason they love quotas for affirmative action. We professors hated it, and thought it was stupid, when Indiana University's Kelley School of Business was obviously far better than the minimum required for accreditation, and the accreditors' questions were mostly faddish and foolish (How do you measure progress to your goals? kind of stuff). I'd rather have direct federal accreditation. We at least could complain to our Congressman, and could sue in court if the regulations were silly.
This is a collection of mostly terrible ideas for imposing federal control on colleges. The 15% rule combines authoritarian control with anti-immigrant bigotry; the purpose of accreditation is to prevent diploma mills, not visa mills. Using government control to reject merit in admissions is a terrible idea. And we have seen the abuses of an antisemitic president using antisemitism as a ridiculous excuse to target his political enemies. We should reduce the power of accreditors to allow new institutions to exist, not try to enhance its power to impose our preferences on colleges.