Are Accreditors to Blame for the Growing Cost of Higher Ed?

Richard Vedder fondly remembers the days when university professors had the closest thing to full ownership of their classes, including what they taught and when they taught it. Of course, school deans might have had a say or two in the material and provided some basic guardrails — like requiring a minimum number of classes. But overall, most of Vedder’s 50-year career as a business professor came with the freedom to customize his material and choose his schedule.

Vedder, now 83, for decades would occasionally mail a course syllabus to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), which helped maintain the reputation of the schools where he taught, including the Claremont Colleges and Washington University in St. Louis. He never felt any inconvenience from handling the accreditation, though, nor any real pressure from his bosses to do so.

“My first 30 years or so of teaching offered a great deal of freedom and influence,” explained Vedder, now a distinguished professor of economics emeritus at Ohio University. “We wore more hats back then, but I felt the autonomy gave us a greater stake in our departments and a greater sense of pride in our work as a whole.”

Unfortunately, those days are long gone. Handcuffed by an ever-growing list of accreditation bureaus, guidelines on coursework and institutional bloating that has delegated more work to administrators, professors like Vedder are less connected with their schools and perhaps less influential than ever. More importantly, universities are paying the inflated costs of keeping up with accreditors and passing those costs onto increasingly price-conscious students.

Accreditation has become significantly more complex in recent decades and now requires more employees for universities to handle the process, explained Vedder. The addition of new accreditors in every field and specialty during the past few decades has also left universities and their staffers with more red tape. But as the cost of higher ed reaches new heights and more high-school students reconsider whether a university education is worth the price, could the accreditation circus and institutional bloat be reaching its tipping point?

Like everything in today’s higher ed landscape, the answer is complex.

The More Accreditation, the Merrier?

Instead of reporting just to the AACSB, many U.S. business schools now aim for the b-school “trifecta” of accreditation, which also includes the Association of MBAs (AMBA) and the EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS). There’s also the International Accreditation Council for Business Education (IACBE), which was added in 1997. Other university departments, like those in law, medicine, sports, math, foreign languages, physics, engineering, teaching and countless other subjects, all report to multiple accreditors at the regional, national and global levels. 

At least 300 higher ed accreditors existed before the Winter 2024 semester. According to Vedder, this is triple the number from the 1990s. But why do universities play ball? In some cases, to keep up with the Joneses — because other universities are doing it and marketing their accreditations to prospective students. 

In other cases, it’s more serious. Most states require schools to be regionally accredited, or the institutions risk losing public funding. The U.S. government also requires certain basic accreditations for universities to receive federal financial aid. Some three dozen schools risked closing as of last year due to potential lost funding from accreditation-related problems.

“In either case, your hands are tied as universities to keep up with all of this,” Vedder said. “And accreditors feel they have these schools over a barrel.”

Outdated Demands, Conflicting Interests and Heavy Spending

Earning accreditation and staying accredited now require much more than the class syllabi Vedder used to submit. As a small example, the American Bar Association forces the law schools it accredits to maintain a physical library complete with a hard copy of every federal court decision from every state and U.S. territory. That’s despite more students than ever turning to digital textbooks and resources when studying.

Likewise, the Higher Learning Commission, a prestigious regional accreditor in the Midwest, requires universities to have staffers that provide “student support services,” such as “cocurricular activities,” tutoring, financial aid and academic advising. Nearly every major accreditor now has some sort of demand for staffing, physical space and resources. Perhaps then it’s not surprising that administrative staff tallies at universities across the country are growing to record highs. 

During Vedder’s heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, most U.S. colleges’ tenured faculty to administrators ratio was approximately one-to-one. As of 2022, reporting from Harvard suggested administrators outnumbered faculty at the leading Ivy League school by at least three-to-one. At Yale, the administrative bloat became so pronounced that in 2021 the university’s number of employed admins exceeded its tally of undergraduate students.

“It’s gotten way out of hand, and it’s added to the costs of everything,” Vedder said. “Most of the standards that accreditors set tend to raise costs by requiring additional personnel.”

Perhaps, the easiest knock against the accrediting bodies comes from the makeup of their leadership and boards. Many accreditors place university deans at the top of their organizations, which creates an obvious conflict of interest when determining regulations and which schools earn accreditation.

The AACSB’s board of directors, for example, includes the dean of Johns Hopkins’ business school as its chairman and Seton Hall University’s dean as its secretary-treasurer. Other board members include business school deans from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Boston, Tulane, Cal Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, Virginia and Wisconsin-Madison.

High Schoolers Weigh Costs, Benefits

Josh Carney, an 18-year-old high school student in Kalamazoo, Michigan, idolizes TV infomercial legends Billy Mays, Vince Offer and Ron Popiel. A frequent user of social media platforms, Carney has long aspired to a similar career in marketing consumer products as a high-energy influencer.

Although the senior at Loy Norrix High School has long considered attending nearby Western Michigan University to study in its regionally accredited sales program and even take some theater classes, Carney believes he can learn more from the internet than a college classroom.

“To make it in sales, a college education wouldn’t hurt,” Carney said, “but it’s not really necessary. My Instagram followers and people on Snapchat or wherever watching me pitch things don’t care about an accreditation.”

The biggest deterrent of all, he said, is the idea of going into debt.

“I don’t want to pay $30,000 a year for a degree just to end up as an assistant at some marketing agency making 15 bucks an hour,” Carney added.

Carney’s situation is far from unique. Even high-schoolers who aspire to more specialized professions are thinking twice about college and accreditation.

Sixteen-year-old Laura Cruz dreams of being an employment attorney to promote racial and gender equity in the workplace. A junior at Rancho High School in Las Vegas, Nevada, Cruz always assumed four years of undergraduate study, followed by a three-year law degree, was her only avenue to the profession. But after reading about a California teen who passed the state bar on his first try back in December, Cruz realized higher ed is not necessary to become a lawyer in the neighboring state.

Cruz said she used to dream of attending top-ranked undergraduate and law schools, which may cost upwards of $500,000 in tuition alone. Even if she stayed locally to study at the lower-ranked University of Nevada Las Vegas for those seven years, she’d still be looking at no less than a $150,000 tuition bill. 

After realizing she could follow the California teen’s path and study for the bar, Cruz said the idea of college has recently lost its luster. Especially considering that she’s had to work a low-wage side job at a bakery to help save for her future tuition.

“I’d love to just focus on studying for the bar and being an attorney now,” she said.

What would it take for Carney and Cruz to reconsider? For some professions, even low-cost or free tuition wouldn’t be worth the benefit of committing four years to a degree. But the cost seems to be a driving factor for students and families on the fence.

“I appreciate the security a college degree would provide in case things don’t work out exactly how I envision,” Cruz said. “I’d love to have other options to fall back on. But the price would have to be right.”

She added, “If I could study at a good school and could graduate without any debt, I would go for that.”