OT: Community College looses accreditation

This is a little off topic but would appreciate some input. My wife has been attending a local community college the past couple years and will be graduating in a couple semesters. She has 4.0 GPA. She informed me that this CC recently lost its accreditation. The reason was because the RA body has determined that too many students from this school have defaulted on their student loans.

I'm perplexed. First, I thought that accreditation was based on academic quality, not the students’ inability, or refusal, to pay student loans. Second, will this loss of accreditation affect my wife’s chances of transferring to a state school? (Obviously, I'll call the school to find out, but I'd like to hear your opinions).

Bob

 

It could inhibit her ability to transfer, but it doesn't have to. In-state schools, especially public ones, should have pretty good realtionships with the community colleges. I can't imagine the community college's entire student body getting "frozen out" from the school's main function: providing the first two years of education leading to a transfer to a state university.

Are you sure accreditation was pulled? I would have expected a period of time where the school's accreditation was placed in probtionary status before it was finally pulled. Of course, the school may have already been on probation and failed to fix the problem.

There is a lot of pressure from the Department of Education placed on accrediting agencies regarding student loan default rates. This is primarily due to the high default rates in technical/trade schools that often charge outrageous tuitions while providing substandard--or useless-training. The USDOE can't reach the individual schools, but it can require the accreditors to punish those schools by removing their accreditation--thus rendering the schools and their students ineligible for federal financial aid.

Your wife should run, not walk, to the nearest admissions office and get herself a spot somewhere. Alternatively, she could apply to a school (perhaps a distance school) that hasn't heard of her community college's accreditation woes. They would see the school listed in the current guide(s) and viola! But I'm thinking a state college isn't going to deny her admission because her public community college has problems.

Rich Douglas

 

This loan default rate may be associated with lots of other problems. Unless we know the name of the school, we can only speculate about them. But if your wife got this information through the school, she may be getting the best possible spin on an uglier situation. Schools that are in trouble typically deny and deny. They argue "Hey, we're great and are being treated unfairly." That's usually not the case.

On this newsgroup we recently saw a proprietary two-year college in San Jose called the 'Master's Institute' collapse and go out of business after showing plenty of warning signs including low loan repayment rates. The school denied everything up until the day the doors closed.

As Rich suggests, if the school is proprietary it may have been charging exorbitant tuitions. Perhaps it was struggling financially and cutting academic corners to retain students and rush them through. The fact that your wife has a 4.0 GPA is a little suspicious. She may be a superb student, but it may also mean that the school is just passing everyone. The school's job placement record for its graduates may be terrible, which would correlate with the low loan repayment rate. The accreditors, along with state consumer advocates, may have been getting all kind of complaints.

I've never heard of a community college having its accreditation revoked merely for having a bad loan default rate. (Many do.) More likely they would lose their eligibility to participate in the loan program or something. There would have to be more to it.

What's more, regional accreditors rarely revoke accreditation without lots of warning. Schools are put on probation first. So the students had to have seen this coming.

My suggestion is not only to contact the school but to contact the accreditor that pulled the accreditation. The school may try to BS you, while the accreditor should tell you what their beef is.

As to the effect that this will have on a student's transfer credits, it's hard to say I guess. Most university admissions offices don't seem very sophisticated. If a school no longer appears on their list of accredited institutions, they probably will just punt and won't bother to look to see if the school was accredited when the credits were earned. So perhaps your wife had better put in her university applications right now and hope that her proposed universities are not using an updated list yet.