Higher Education Accreditation: Market Regulation or Government Regulation Revisited

Joshua Hall

No 15-42, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: Higher education is under fire in the United States. Pressure, both financial and political, is being placed on colleges and universities to reform. One barrier to reform that has been put forth is accreditation. While calls for reform have identified what appear to be problems with accreditation, it is important to not engage in the nirvana fallacy and assume that what we can imagine will be better will be better. In that light, I look at the history of the accreditation process with a focus on the role the federal government has played and how that has in uenced other players in the higher education market. After surveying the history, I conclude that accreditation as currently practiced in not self- regulation, but rather government regulation.

Keywords: accreditation; quality assurance; cartel; market process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
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