Accreditation is one of the murkier and less sensational zones of academic politics. But it's also one of the most important ones. To be eligible to receive federal student aid, a college or university must be accredited. No accreditation, no aid. For many schools, to lose accreditation is, thus, not only to face a radical reorganization of the student body--but to face institutional failure. To the extent that a school depends on federal student aid dollars to stay afloat, that school is terrifically vulnerable to capricious accreditors. Small colleges are particularly vulnerable. And when accreditors get capricious, it's a recipe for disaster.

That's what's happening at St. Andrews Presbyterian College, a tiny 800-student school in North Carolina whose accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), revoked its accreditation for not well-specified concerns about the school's financial stability. Alleging lack of due process, St. Andrews has been embroiled in a lawsuit against SACS since 2007 as a result -- and is not faring well in the courts, which are showing exceptional deference to SACS' power to make or break the college economically (irony of the day: note accreditor's power to produce self-fulfilling prophecies).

David French says what needs to be said:

By conditioning virtually any meaningful federal or state educational benefit on accreditation and then by explicitly recognizing specific accreditors, the government has imbued them with an astonishing level of power over colleges and universities. Is it too much to expect powerful entities to promulgate precise standards? While it seems easy for a court to wash its hands of a case when a debt-burdened college challenges a financial-stability finding, excessive deference could prove dangerous. After all, how does one measure a commitment to "diversity" or "social justice" or any of the other ideological "metrics" that are creeping into the accreditation process? Can a federal court really wash its hands of accreditation decisions when the accreditor derives its power from the government?

ACTA has argued--quite convincingly and interestingly--that our accreditation system is badly broken, and has laid out a plan for repairing it. Among the recommendations: break the link between accreditation and federal financial aid. See ACTA's 2007 report, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About it.