So…. Florida….

Well, this should be interesting… the political bickering and polarization of higher education continues and is now challenging one of its strongest pillars - accreditation.

 

Is there supposed to be a link to something here?

 

Maybe, he meant this:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/02/11/florida-bill-would-require-colleges-change-accreditors

 

Quote: "A requirement to switch accreditors would not have been possible until recently, when the Department of Education started recognizing regional and national accrediting agencies as “institutional accreditors,” opening up the opportunity for institutions to seek accreditation from agencies outside their geographical region. "

 

Thanks, tadj!

 

Sounds like a crazy idea with no real advantages only down sides. I'll be surprised if Florida does it.

 

Never doubt Florida’s ability to go…

 

Let's put it this way.

I'd be surprised if Florida went full retard on this issue but I'd be even more surprised if just about any other state did the same thing.

 

Assuming this passed, which accreditors would even play this game? Even though accreditation is granted for a fixed period, it is still a continuous relationship. Whoever came up with this has no idea what goes into getting and maintaining RA.

 

Firstly, not OK. Let's drop the "R" word.

However, I do agree that this is a stupid idea that will hurt Florida more than anything. That being said, Florida also had a public school denied initial accreditation in the fairly recent past. Florida's system has a robust transfer program. Take a course at one state school and it automatically transfers to another state school. It's easily one of the healthier versions of a state university system. Compare it to, say, SUNY where if you take some courses at Binghamton and transfer to Cortland, you apply as an external applicant and have transcripts sent the same as if your coursework came from something outside of SUNY. It's inefficient and kind of pointless.

That said, introducing a state school to the Florida ecosystem that was accredited by a non-RA accreditor would be a potential game changer because you would likely have a forced transfer of NA credits to not just one but an entire system of RA schools.

I think that this is a dangerous time for the RAs not because what they do is necessarily wrong but because they have enjoyed a monopoly over their respective geographies for a long time and some people are getting sick of the monopoly. Imagine if, for example, New York turned around and said "Screw the ABA. Anyone from anywhere can take the NYS bar exam. We are de-regulating law school." You would likely have a crop of perfectly respectable NYS based schools suddenly opening law schools and a sudden generation of lawyers who are admitted to practice in one of the most significant states for the practice of law in the country. It would be a huge blow. And it wouldn't be unreasonable to see other states suddenly breaking ranks with the ABA to allow these NYS endorsed attorneys the ability to cross state lines and practice elsewhere. ABA's death grip would be loosened like the CV joint that decided to fail on my car (sorry, dealing with a thing today...)

So too if Florida broke ranks with the RA cartel (used here to describe the structure, not to imply it is a criminal enterprise like a drug cartel) a significant number of member schools suddenly are accepting NA credits no matter what their RA thinks. This will inevitably force the hand of other states. This could create situations like we see on much smaller scale elsewhere where you have NA schools with programmatic accreditation becoming more the norm than the exception and complicating the math around acceptance.

It could be a thing. Or it could just be a bluff. I lean toward the latter.

But people really hate monopolies. But unlike public utilities, the regional accreditors don't have throngs of happy shareholders who are keen to maintain the status quo. You have private schools who hate the games they play. You have state schools who need to justify the seven figure consulting fees to maintain that accreditation. And you have a ready for talk TV sound byte about taking a free market approach to finding an accreditor rather than being locked in based on geography.

I will not be shocked if we see the strength of RA break down in the coming years. I do doubt that this is it.