Rubio on "Higher Ed cartel"

As you might imagine, he doesn't like the current system.

Marco Rubio Calls for Breaking Up U.S. Higher Education 'Cartel' - Bloomberg Politics

 

I don't find what he's saying particularly objectionable, except that (regarding accreditation) it's 40 years out of date.

But this is a red herring. Their real objective is to reduce higher education opportunities. Having higher education correlates negatively to support for him and his cohorts.

 

Rubio "If America had taken this action 10 years ago, the nation would have acquired $590 billion worth of foreign firms, instead of losing $179 billion worth of U.S. businesses, Rubio said."

In fact there are lots of foreign companies that have set up operations in the USA because of favorable conditions; not only tax but because of available work talent, and preferential business climate. Companies set up over here include BAE, Rolls Royce (aero engines), cycling teams (BMC, Trek, Cannondale who operate mostly in Europe and hire mostly Europeans), Fiat (bought Chrysler), VW, BMW, Japanese auto companies.

Sorry for the hijack.

 

I agree with your blog post. Rubio wants to break up private accreditation agencies and replace them with what? A government agency? How is that making higher education more of a free market? He obviously has never heard of University of the People and Nations University. There are other cheap NA schools such as Ashworth and Penn Foster. WGU, Patten University, and many other RA schools are experimenting with competency-based programs that are often cheaper than traditional programs. The U.S. Department of Education just recognizes which accreditation bodies are legitimate, and they don't even always do that directly. Some accrediting bodies are recognized indirectly through CHEA.

 

Please consider in general that Rubio has no expertise in how to run a complex organization whatsoever; yet he thinks he is ready to lead /manage the largest bureaucracy in the world, e.g., over-confident. Rubio’s résumé cries "lightweight". IMO, Rubio is … WAY TOO overrated… Such occurs absent a through vetting of candidates.

"Charismatic leadership is non-leadership because the charisma of the leader blinds followers to the absence of substance in the leader's message . . . until it's too late."—Peter Drucker

 

I'm a bit torn here. Our accreditation system is a complex mess.

Yeah, we have NA agencies. And, we can argue, they serve an important function. But try to get a degree from one of those schools evaluated for working in Canada or the UK and you're going to hear a familiar saying "RA or the highway."

The Regional Accreditors are empowered in the exact same was as the National and Programmatic Accreditors. The USDOE didn't give RA super authority or NA lesser authority. That approval process, first and foremost, grants schools access to federal funds.

Consider the New York Civil Service, every position which requires a degree requires that it be from a school that is 1) Regionally accredited or 2) registered with the NYS Board of Regents. That means that a hypothetical school accredited by DEAC, ACICS or any number of other accreditors but is domiciled in NYS (where they would be required to register with the Board of Regents) is acceptable alongside an RA school for purposes of state employment and (in some but not all cases) licensure.

Add to the confusion the fact that an RA degree may be worthless without a specific programmatic accreditation.

Sure, there's an element of caveat emptor at play. If you want to become a Social Worker you should go out and do your homework about what sort of accreditations a school has to have. But those waters get murky when it comes to programmatic accreditation. Consider, for a moment, that my wife attended a traditional B&M school with leafy quads and professors wearing elbow patches for her Masters in Mental Health Counseling. It wasn't CACREP accredited (which was far less common at the time) but it was licensure qualifying for a license in Pennsylvania. That was fine and good until she moved to New York. Then, CACREP or the highway. Or, as it turned out, months and months of third party evaluations by private providers and other universities trying to show that this program was equivalent to the programs offered in NYS.

That doesn't mean that Mr. Rubio is actually making sense. What I see is the familiar political war cry without any semblance of a clear path toward a solution. He wants to tear down this present system. OK, fine. But, as sanantone notes, replace it with what? A government agency? It could work or it could be equally as dysfunctional.

We have a strange system in that government approval of a school means virtually nothing. I could attend a school approved by say, the state of Virginia, but without the accreditation of a privately operated, member run institution, my degree is worthless to most employers. The State of Virginia's imprimatur means something for a high school, an elementary school, a hospital and all of the licensed professionals who practice in that state. But when it comes to an actual university it, in and of itself, is absolutely worthless.

What it does is limit the utility of a state approved degree. Even a state that is especially rigorous in approving universities, like Oregon, can offer little by way of degree utility. This is Oregon, the place where using my Almeda degree without a proper disclaimer can result in criminal charges, and even their state approval of an unaccredited institution is virtually meaningless outside of the state. So I can attend an unaccredited school of psychology in California or Oregon. I may get a license to practice psychology in either, or both, of those states but elsewhere my degree is viewed as nothing but a worthless piece of paper. Why? Because it lacks the accreditation of a private, member run organization and simply operates with the unsatisfactory approval of a state.

Yeah, it's kind of a messed up system. And it's an unfortunate consequence of state sovereignty. It is a modern day look at how ridiculous it must have been when each state issued its own currency. But it is so ingrained into our educational culture that we sometimes don't see it for how messed up it really is.

Does it warrant change? I think it does. The problem I see is that Mr. Rubio doesn't seem to have a solution. He has talking points.

If someone asked me (and they didn't) my solution would look more like what New York has in place (i.e. a state approval process AND an institutional accreditation process). Then I would unite the states in regions. So each regional accreditor would consist of state-based accreditors.

Oh, Louisiana is screwing around with religious exemption? No problem, the regional body can put them on probation until they bring things up to spec. That probation can result in sanctions against the state's major universities as well. What state would reasonably sacrifice their state university system in favor of a few little church schools? I can't imagine any serious politician would be willing to sacrifice the arm to save a loose fingernail.

In a system like that, "regionally accredited" would mean that it had institutional accreditation by a state's department of education and was in compliance with regional standards. I don't think there's anything wrong with the accrediting agencies, per se, but there are so many of them in such a convoluted web of complexities and nuance that no reasonable person can really wrap their arms around it without lots of study. Look at all of us here. We are all pretty well familiar with some of these nuances and yet we cannot arrive at a consensus on things like degree utility, transfer options, institutional quality etc. So what change does the average college student have? An eighteen year old may well be duped into an unaccredited school thinking that state approval actually means something in a world where it doesn't. An adult who returns to work may mistakenly believe that national accreditation is the "better" or more widely accepted form of accreditation over regional accreditation.

And, at the institutional level, it means that you better have a significant amount of capital if you want to start a college or university. There's very little hope for the handful of college professors who want to start a concept college with an alternative learning model. Winning state approval is one thing. But institutional accreditation is almost certainly going to require incredibly costly site visits and engaging the services of an accreditation consultant. Yet, that same team of professors can, with relatively little money or outside help, start up a new high school (where state approval would actually matter). For a college, however, those professors' best bet would be to find a venture capitalist willing to invest in them, shop around for the accreditation path that offered them the least resistance and try to seize as much market share as possible. I don't have a problem with that model but I'd also like to see a world where a small group of people get together and decide to offer one or two degree programs, teach those subjects very well and be able to confer a meaningful degree without a six figure (absolute minimum) investment in consultants and paying for business class plane tickets for a team of evaluators from across the country.

I'd love to see a system that made more sense, made Americans more marketable to European and Canadian employers (by not getting screwed in degree evaluations) and offered clearer paths to accreditation for new institutions. Mr. Rubio's plan doesn't offer that largely because he doesn't actually have a plan. But I think it's a bit optimistic to look at our present system and give it a big ol' thumbs up.

 

All of that is dancing around the edges. Sure, things are a little weird once you get out there, largely because (a) who determines what is and is not a degree-granting institution is left to the states, (b) the real authorities are the accreditors, and (c) you have some non-RA institutional accreditors.

For the vast majority of situations, it boils down to this: regional accreditation plus, in some instances, programmatic accreditation. All of the other stuff--states' roles, national accrediting agencies, religious exemptions--are truly outliers affecting a small percentage of people. They receive out-sized discussion on this board because we specialize in that stuff. In the real world, it almost never arises. That's also why change (like in the case of DEAC striving for comparable recognition) is glacial--almost no one cares.

Rubio has membership in a group that specializes in railing against those forces that buttress the middle class: unions, education, health care, social programs, and social welfare (like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security). Rubio is no different, which is why he offers a solution--big government--to a privatized system--accreditation. But isn't favoring government over the private sector kinda their thing? Sure, unless that piece of philosophy interferes with an even bigger goal.

 

No, people do care, they just don't realize that they do.

The University of Phoenix is RA and has a number of programmatic accreditations. Public perception? Pretty negative.

Full Sail University is NA. Public perception? Some negative by virtue of being a for-profit NA school. But the school was ranked pretty favorably in Princeton Review and has some pretty happy alumni.

The average person does care they just don't have the means to articulate what it is they care about because they haven't spent the time trying to tease all of the nonsense out.

The fact that it only affects a small portion of the population is really the king of all cop-outs. Oh, this convoluted system is messed up and royally screws over people, but only a small percentage of people who, in a more streamlined system, wouldn't get screwed over.

That doesn't mean that the system is good or that the system doesn't need change it means that the system isn't flawed to the point where it is likely to draw the political force to actually change it. That's a huge difference.

The State of California can grant me privilege to drive a motor vehicle, practice medicine, law, engineering, public accounting, nursing, chiropractic or acupuncture. The State of California can give me the authority to start a high school that will educate kids ranging from (approximately) 14 - 18. The State of California can license a hospital, a nursing home or a rehab center.

But if the State of California authorizes a school to operate, its graduates to practice any (or all) of those regulated professions and that school simply doesn't participate in the RA world then those graduates are basically restricted to the state of California. Their ability to practice elsewhere virtually nonexistent and the mere use of their degrees on a resume heavily restricted in states like Oregon.

It's a backward system.

It's a system where the schools effectively manage themselves and state approval is relegated to a second class status.

And, again, you might consider these situations to be outliers, but when you talk about things like PhDs teaching in Ivy League Medical Schools (or the fact that an Ivy League institution, until very recently, had NA) and people with degrees from religious schools running into issues furthering their educations, getting professional licenses or getting certain jobs it raises the question; why? Why does such a system with such gaps exist?

They exist because the system is flawed. But it is flawed to a level where the majority don't end up getting screwed so there isn't the political momentum to correct it. But that doesn't make the system any less flawed.

 

The thing is that Rubio is supposed to be for states' rights. What is the message he's trying to convey as a presidential candidate? Does he want the federal government to further extend its control over something that is mostly controlled by the states? States are the ones that give schools the license to operate. States are the ones that require schools to become accredited within a certain period of time. States are the ones that require programmatic accreditation for certain licenses. The federal government, generally, does not make a distinction between regional and national accreditation. However, many state and local agencies treat RA and NA differently. The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement won't recognize degrees from NA schools. Does Rubio want interfere with Texas' right to have this policy?

 

I suppose my intend earlier was to really separate two distinct issues: how accreditation in this country could be drastically improved to cut down on the expense and streamline how a degree in this country is "legitimized" and the non-statements by Marco Rubio.

The thing is, Rubio isn't actually proposing anything. It's been one of my great frustrations with the GOP over the years. At least trickle down economics was a theory, regardless of what one's opinion on the subject is. But lately, the GOP has decided against offering solutions just stating what they intend to dismantle.

ACA? Repeal it. Don't fix healthcare at all. Don't propose a better system. Just straight up repeal the ACA and go back to the way things were before.

Accreditation in the U.S.? Dismantle it. Replace it with what? Uhh...something better. What, exactly? Well, let's focus on dismantling it first and then we'll come up with a solution.

It's a silly exercise in politicking and it reveals that Rubio has absolutely zero concept of what he's talking about. But, since he's a politician, I imagine that his vague allusions would in some way enrich him and his associates.

Expanding government is a big GOP no-no, but creating some outsourced monster isn't. So, I suppose Rubio could be a fan of creating a single accrediting body (perhaps a for-profit company?) that essentially has a monopoly on all higher ed everything. It wouldn't be terribly unlike a public utility. The company that conveys my electricity has shareholders and could, theoretically, go out of business. In reality, because they control something I desperately need if I want to keep up my video game addiction, they can charge me whatever they want to satisfy their bottom line.

I'm sure that in a Rubio world the U.S. Accreditation Association, Inc would at least give the appearance of the American dream because it, as a for-profit entity, could enrich its shareholders while providing a single source of U.S. accreditation. You would be able to strip the power away from the member-schools and place it in the hands of a few money hungry oligarchs.

In that sense, he wouldn't be forcing Texas to do anything. Texas could absolutely hold the requirement that a school be regionally accredited but why would a school bother with regional accreditation when the hypothetical USAAI was the only accreditor that actually gave a school access to federal funds?

Naturally, I don't know if that is his master plan or if he has a master plan at all. It's equally possible he's just saying stuff about education to try to score a cabinet level appointment as say, Secretary of Education, from someone who might actually win the presidential election.

A former Secretary of Education could likely command a mighty salary after leaving office.

In short, my imagination is limited in the number of sleazy possibilities that could enter a politician's mind (a seeming fountain of sleazy, self-serving ideas) it could possibly conjure up. But I'm sure Rubio, like most other politicians in Washington, has an agenda that would nauseate us all as he aims to fill up a Scrooge McDuck-like money bank.

None of that should detract us from the single little nugget of sanity he touched upon, however. U.S. accreditation is messed up and should really be fixed.

 

Marco Rubio is an idiot.

 

You know, the scary part is that there are probably some university proprietors who think that national accreditation is better thaqn regional accreditation.

 

Depends upon your perspective a bit.

For a student, the "better" accreditation is the one that helps you achieve a professional goal. If your state requires RA to become a teacher, a cop, a CPA etc. Then RA is the way to go. If an NA degree helps you pull yourself out of a tight economic position and springboard up to a living wage then that's great.

If you are an Ivy educated lawyer who owns a significant share of the XYZ Education Corp, the best accreditation is the cheapest and easiest one that gives your company access to federal funds (if that is your business model).

Different objectives = different solutions