How For-Profit Colleges Stay In Business Despite Terrible Track Record
The boards of these two accrediting agencies are packed with executives from prominent for-profit college corporations. Ten of the 15 board members supervising the ACICS are drawn from the industry, including executives from Corinthian, Education Corporation of America and ITT Technical Institute. On the ACCSC board, industry executives fill eight of the 13 slots, representing publicly traded companies such as Universal Technical Institute and Kaplan Higher Education… A House higher education funding bill from the early 1990s proposed taking away the accreditors’ ties to federal aid funds… In the years after the congressional investigations, government auditors continued to raise questions about how accreditors were rating colleges, particularly for-profit programs. A 1996 report from the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) found that accrediting agency staff “do not have the experience and expertise for reviewing and accrediting proprietary schools.”
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by Chris Kirkham and Kevin Short, The Huffington Post.