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.
The colleges are doing many things wrong. And your response is to smother new ones so they can't arise. You call anything that threatens the status quo "terrible", and maybe you are terrified.
This article in the NY Times, of course, deletes the reason for the visa denial and the ending of grants. Academic freedom does not enter into it. This is 💯 that these universities coddled, aided and abbeted international criminal action coordinated with the slaughter of innocent people.
The reason for that, of course, is administrations at the ivies bought by Qatari money. And it is that servile toadying to a terrorist dictatorship's Emir (don't blather the royalty canard) that robbed Harvard, Columbia and other ivies of their "academic fweedom" long before things came to a head on Oct 7th. A favored professional student terrorist leader disclosed publicly that he knew about the attack to come on Oct 7th and celebrated it.
There are no visa mills; there could be diploma mills that give visas, but Princeton, Yale, NU, and Illinois are clearly not diploma mills, and percentages prove absolutely nothing. There is no conspiracy of universities with Qatar to plot the slaughter of the innocent, and this is all nonsense. When the people supporting Trump's repression are obviously crackpots, it should make reasonable people tempted to go along out of hatred for Harvard to question this abuse of power.
"This is 💯 that these universities coddled, aided and abbeted international criminal action coordinated with the slaughter of innocent people."
I spoke very carefully. These are acts of these universities. That they took in aggregate the majority of the $100 billion plus from Qatar is fact. I followed the money.
Not all are crackpot, but people far worse than crackpots are in this administration.
RFK Jr is a litigation attorney who founded the primary global anti-vax entity in order to further his agenda to end the vaccine special masters court. Bhattacharya and Makary and Prasad are classic third world dirtbags who care only for power. Toadies for influence. Rather evil men those are.
It is important to decompose matters to see clearly. This one, about the ivies is clear and in the right.
The student president said that students come to university to "get drunk and get laid." And I fear that many do. Others come in order to vilify men and advance female supremacy, as blacks (BIPOC) come to advance black supremacy, and LBGTQ2S++ come to advance gay supremacy, and other come to celebrate Hamas and the killing of Jews, with a practical attempt to chase Jews and "Zionist" off campus. It is no wonder that the average intelligence of college students has fallen to the average level of the general population. And that grade inflation has rewarded students who did not earn the reward. Universities are not serious places any more. We already knew this from their abandonment of "the search for truth" through evidence and debate, in favor of woke ideology indoctrination. Our biggest job is not accrediting new universities, but de-accrediting most that currently exist.
I thought the ideas in this essay make a lot of sense. If the federal government is giving them taxpayer funds then they need to follow the law and I would like to see more spots available for US citizens. Maybe there's a way to open up more visa slots if a particular college can prove it doesn't have enough citizens who want to attend. (not sure if that's even a thing) I am worried about visa slots from countries who do a lot of spying and stealing, like China.
Good points. Yes accreditation needs reform. Indeed the whole academic process is in dire need of reform, as shown by the Grievance Studies Affair.
The 15% cap is too low. It should be 25%. Do not underestimate the contributions foreign students bring besides their much larger tuition fees. Similarly collaborative initiatives with other foreign institutions bring real benefits.
I attended a very good university you've heard of, and my undergrad experience was rich and interesting even though there were not many foreign undergrads there in the 1970's.
I was a foreign student in the US. I later got a green card and became a citizen.
I have created several technologies that almost every single American uses every day of their lives, sometimes multiple times. Many tens of billions were invested in each of these. Hopefully, several more are to come.
I would tell you EXACTLY what I did, but then that would reveal who I am, wouldn't it?
How specific do you want to get ? What do you need?
How about this? A university is accredited if its student body is in top quintile of SAT and GRE scorers. Sure, it shifts the work to another private party but at least it's more objective.
It is a great idea but it would make a LOT of people very very angry.
However, maybe that is not such a bad thing, considering. After all, what is a college or university FOR, exactly? It should NOT be about making money from a football or basketball team, probably. And just making them dens of iniquity so a few kids can run wild for a few years is not that great an idea either. Manufacturing protesters and terrorists is not a great idea I do not think.Turning them into almost prison settings for some street hoodlums is not great either. So what are they for?
I have wondered about changing accreditation requirements to encourage more productive and efficient higher learning institutions.
For example, accreditation might require an institution to have a certain "tooth to tail ratio", which aims at a better balance of research and teaching staff and administrative staff. Or it could put constraints on remuneration of football coaches and administrators. Or other desirable goals could be incorporated into the accreditation criteria.
I actually did not know that universities themselves issued student visas. I thought the state department issued all visas for foreigners. I have a problem with universities getting to have some of the state department's powers but none of the state department's oversight.
You new fascists has no right to "law and order" claims when DOGE and the Trump administration have illegally withheld billions in funding to universities, grantees, and illegally dismantled their own agencies. In the new America, the law is always on the side of Trump and his goons and only to be used to persecute those who disagree. This is way less free than anything the left pulled the past 10 years so go back to your cave troglodyte.
These are good suggestions...but should be augmented by holding individual institutions and administrators legally...and personally...accountable for the actions of the international students they admit. Admit a bunch of antisemitic-pro-Palestinian protesters who violate the law by creating a hostile environment on campus? No only do the international students get deported...but the university loses the right to admit new students AND the admissions staff, advising faculty, president and Dean's go to jail for aiding and abetting the conduct of the criminal foreign students.
I agree, but there's a bigger problem, fake studentship. The rise of Shadow Scholars who do papers and theses for studentsand grad students (like Gay) was already a quiet crisis. Now we have a shadow scholar generation that has LLM technology do everything for them.
We need a system at minimum in which a statistical quality control sample of students is thoroughly tested. Have them write while segrgated with access only to specific disclosed materials. Have them pass oral examinations. That becomes the rating of the college, publicly posted along with graduation rate over 6 years.
And the college cannot test and rate its own students.
We need a rethink of what a college or a school is. The assignments shouldn't be easily gamed. Maybe instead of "write a 20 page paper", it should be "write a three volume book of 1000 pages or more, with AI help". Or else writing assignments in class under exam conditions. The 20 page paper is no longer the right tool.
Maybe other things about college should be rethought too, campuses are expensive, but they are already built and not good for much else as recent efforts to sell off campuses of closed colleges showed.
Few 1000 page books get read, and reading has massively declined over the past 30 years---another crisis. I'm curious if you have ever read through a 1000 page book and done page by page comments on accuracy, intelligibility and checked citations?
I understand your intent, but let's try to make these things that professors and grad students can be expected to do.
As a for instance, when I was a grad student I taught a lab section from a syllabus for 80 students out of a 1500 or so, and proctored lectures and exams. The professor did not evaluate a single exam. He only evaluated the clicker-based interactive part of his lectures. My role in that was to find the students (not all of whom were enrolled in the class) who were sitting there with 5 or 10 clickers answering the questions. No attendance was taken in lectures. Some students sat for the first subsection (half of the class at a time) and then attended the second lecture having obtained the clicker answers.
This was a part-time gig for grad students. In reality, reading through all the tests I gave to my students and grading them was mostly a full-time job. Some grad students handled it by just giving everyone a B or randomly assigning grades and waiting for complaints, then doing a real eval for complainers.
PS - I had a kind of hilarious interaction with a "foreign student" who had terrible English. I urged her to take ESL classes to improve her English skills. Turned out she was from San Francisco's Chinatown and her family had been in the USA for over a century. She was beyond miffed. She was in outraged dudgeon. I stuck to my recommendation even so, because her English was probably the worst of any college student I ever ran across. All the Chinese students had much better English.
Have 2 other AI's grade the paper. Really we should lean into AI, but we need to protect our privacy. It should be a locally run AI that has no leak out into the cloud.
Horses are nice, but how much more equine husbandry are we going to promote in college in the age of the automobile and airplane?
Sigh. This quite misses the point. First, AI is not "intelligent" in any way. When it seems intelligent? That's because it scraped something intelligent off the internet that a human wrote. It makes statistical associations.
Second, the whole point of education is that humans be educated. That means learning for themselves, which is hard. That means learning how to think, write, read, do mathematics and read mathematics, critique, etcetera.
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.
Yes, it is time for alternatives to the current accreditation cabals!
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.
John K. Wilson loves our corrupt universities just as they are! Remarkable! And exhibits the typical TDS of his ilk.
The colleges are doing many things wrong. And your response is to smother new ones so they can't arise. You call anything that threatens the status quo "terrible", and maybe you are terrified.
So, you admit that visa mills are a thing.
NY Times: Princeton, 8,849, 24% ; Yale, 14,854, 24% ; Northwestern, 19,451, 24% ; Illinois, 47,118, 23%. Etcetera.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/upshot/harvard-trump-international-students.html
This article in the NY Times, of course, deletes the reason for the visa denial and the ending of grants. Academic freedom does not enter into it. This is 💯 that these universities coddled, aided and abbeted international criminal action coordinated with the slaughter of innocent people.
The reason for that, of course, is administrations at the ivies bought by Qatari money. And it is that servile toadying to a terrorist dictatorship's Emir (don't blather the royalty canard) that robbed Harvard, Columbia and other ivies of their "academic fweedom" long before things came to a head on Oct 7th. A favored professional student terrorist leader disclosed publicly that he knew about the attack to come on Oct 7th and celebrated it.
So, Mr. Wilson, what say you?
There are no visa mills; there could be diploma mills that give visas, but Princeton, Yale, NU, and Illinois are clearly not diploma mills, and percentages prove absolutely nothing. There is no conspiracy of universities with Qatar to plot the slaughter of the innocent, and this is all nonsense. When the people supporting Trump's repression are obviously crackpots, it should make reasonable people tempted to go along out of hatred for Harvard to question this abuse of power.
Res ipsa loquitor. Read better Mr. Wilson.
"This is 💯 that these universities coddled, aided and abbeted international criminal action coordinated with the slaughter of innocent people."
I spoke very carefully. These are acts of these universities. That they took in aggregate the majority of the $100 billion plus from Qatar is fact. I followed the money.
Not all are crackpot, but people far worse than crackpots are in this administration.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3501247.3531573
RFK Jr is a litigation attorney who founded the primary global anti-vax entity in order to further his agenda to end the vaccine special masters court. Bhattacharya and Makary and Prasad are classic third world dirtbags who care only for power. Toadies for influence. Rather evil men those are.
It is important to decompose matters to see clearly. This one, about the ivies is clear and in the right.
The student president said that students come to university to "get drunk and get laid." And I fear that many do. Others come in order to vilify men and advance female supremacy, as blacks (BIPOC) come to advance black supremacy, and LBGTQ2S++ come to advance gay supremacy, and other come to celebrate Hamas and the killing of Jews, with a practical attempt to chase Jews and "Zionist" off campus. It is no wonder that the average intelligence of college students has fallen to the average level of the general population. And that grade inflation has rewarded students who did not earn the reward. Universities are not serious places any more. We already knew this from their abandonment of "the search for truth" through evidence and debate, in favor of woke ideology indoctrination. Our biggest job is not accrediting new universities, but de-accrediting most that currently exist.
I thought the ideas in this essay make a lot of sense. If the federal government is giving them taxpayer funds then they need to follow the law and I would like to see more spots available for US citizens. Maybe there's a way to open up more visa slots if a particular college can prove it doesn't have enough citizens who want to attend. (not sure if that's even a thing) I am worried about visa slots from countries who do a lot of spying and stealing, like China.
Good points. Yes accreditation needs reform. Indeed the whole academic process is in dire need of reform, as shown by the Grievance Studies Affair.
The 15% cap is too low. It should be 25%. Do not underestimate the contributions foreign students bring besides their much larger tuition fees. Similarly collaborative initiatives with other foreign institutions bring real benefits.
What are those contributions? Please be specific.
I attended a very good university you've heard of, and my undergrad experience was rich and interesting even though there were not many foreign undergrads there in the 1970's.
I was a foreign student in the US. I later got a green card and became a citizen.
I have created several technologies that almost every single American uses every day of their lives, sometimes multiple times. Many tens of billions were invested in each of these. Hopefully, several more are to come.
I would tell you EXACTLY what I did, but then that would reveal who I am, wouldn't it?
How specific do you want to get ? What do you need?
Also was a foreign student (didn’t seek the green card). As was my kid thirty years later. We make real meaningful contributions.
I can offer other examples besides myself of course. Not all foreign students work out and are a net positive for the US. But some sure are.
Could start with Google. Several tech companies were founded by foreign students.
How about this? A university is accredited if its student body is in top quintile of SAT and GRE scorers. Sure, it shifts the work to another private party but at least it's more objective.
It is a great idea but it would make a LOT of people very very angry.
However, maybe that is not such a bad thing, considering. After all, what is a college or university FOR, exactly? It should NOT be about making money from a football or basketball team, probably. And just making them dens of iniquity so a few kids can run wild for a few years is not that great an idea either. Manufacturing protesters and terrorists is not a great idea I do not think.Turning them into almost prison settings for some street hoodlums is not great either. So what are they for?
I have wondered about changing accreditation requirements to encourage more productive and efficient higher learning institutions.
For example, accreditation might require an institution to have a certain "tooth to tail ratio", which aims at a better balance of research and teaching staff and administrative staff. Or it could put constraints on remuneration of football coaches and administrators. Or other desirable goals could be incorporated into the accreditation criteria.
I actually did not know that universities themselves issued student visas. I thought the state department issued all visas for foreigners. I have a problem with universities getting to have some of the state department's powers but none of the state department's oversight.
You new fascists has no right to "law and order" claims when DOGE and the Trump administration have illegally withheld billions in funding to universities, grantees, and illegally dismantled their own agencies. In the new America, the law is always on the side of Trump and his goons and only to be used to persecute those who disagree. This is way less free than anything the left pulled the past 10 years so go back to your cave troglodyte.
These are good suggestions...but should be augmented by holding individual institutions and administrators legally...and personally...accountable for the actions of the international students they admit. Admit a bunch of antisemitic-pro-Palestinian protesters who violate the law by creating a hostile environment on campus? No only do the international students get deported...but the university loses the right to admit new students AND the admissions staff, advising faculty, president and Dean's go to jail for aiding and abetting the conduct of the criminal foreign students.
I agree, but there's a bigger problem, fake studentship. The rise of Shadow Scholars who do papers and theses for studentsand grad students (like Gay) was already a quiet crisis. Now we have a shadow scholar generation that has LLM technology do everything for them.
We need a system at minimum in which a statistical quality control sample of students is thoroughly tested. Have them write while segrgated with access only to specific disclosed materials. Have them pass oral examinations. That becomes the rating of the college, publicly posted along with graduation rate over 6 years.
And the college cannot test and rate its own students.
Seriously, this is a screaming crisis.
We need a rethink of what a college or a school is. The assignments shouldn't be easily gamed. Maybe instead of "write a 20 page paper", it should be "write a three volume book of 1000 pages or more, with AI help". Or else writing assignments in class under exam conditions. The 20 page paper is no longer the right tool.
Maybe other things about college should be rethought too, campuses are expensive, but they are already built and not good for much else as recent efforts to sell off campuses of closed colleges showed.
Few 1000 page books get read, and reading has massively declined over the past 30 years---another crisis. I'm curious if you have ever read through a 1000 page book and done page by page comments on accuracy, intelligibility and checked citations?
I understand your intent, but let's try to make these things that professors and grad students can be expected to do.
As a for instance, when I was a grad student I taught a lab section from a syllabus for 80 students out of a 1500 or so, and proctored lectures and exams. The professor did not evaluate a single exam. He only evaluated the clicker-based interactive part of his lectures. My role in that was to find the students (not all of whom were enrolled in the class) who were sitting there with 5 or 10 clickers answering the questions. No attendance was taken in lectures. Some students sat for the first subsection (half of the class at a time) and then attended the second lecture having obtained the clicker answers.
This was a part-time gig for grad students. In reality, reading through all the tests I gave to my students and grading them was mostly a full-time job. Some grad students handled it by just giving everyone a B or randomly assigning grades and waiting for complaints, then doing a real eval for complainers.
PS - I had a kind of hilarious interaction with a "foreign student" who had terrible English. I urged her to take ESL classes to improve her English skills. Turned out she was from San Francisco's Chinatown and her family had been in the USA for over a century. She was beyond miffed. She was in outraged dudgeon. I stuck to my recommendation even so, because her English was probably the worst of any college student I ever ran across. All the Chinese students had much better English.
Have 2 other AI's grade the paper. Really we should lean into AI, but we need to protect our privacy. It should be a locally run AI that has no leak out into the cloud.
Horses are nice, but how much more equine husbandry are we going to promote in college in the age of the automobile and airplane?
Sigh. This quite misses the point. First, AI is not "intelligent" in any way. When it seems intelligent? That's because it scraped something intelligent off the internet that a human wrote. It makes statistical associations.
Second, the whole point of education is that humans be educated. That means learning for themselves, which is hard. That means learning how to think, write, read, do mathematics and read mathematics, critique, etcetera.
I thought U of Austin was deliberately avoiding seeking any federal funds, to remain an independent institution?
Independent schools still seek accreditation.