College Accreditors: 'New Colleges Need Not Apply' | Hacker News Reader

College Accreditors: 'New Colleges Need Not Apply'

college101.org

28 pointsjseliger6 comments

This was an interesting quip: “college accreditors might be the most important institutions in American society about which nobody has heard a peep”

The student loan crisis means, by definition, that the established players are providing poor outcomes, but new entrants that would provide competition and innovation are gatekept out by accreditors.

There is a bigger iceberg lurking around. Look up the people who control medical school accreditation and funding. They have more blood on hands than many other industries put together. Medical innovation has been slowed down by magnitudes because of their gatekeeping.

Not just funding and accreditation, but admissions as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_v._Association_of_America...

It’s not just medical schools but the entire pipeline from there into professional accreditation by limiting residency programs working with Congress to cap them as part of Medicare legislation / funding. It’s only recently that the AMA agreed to lift the spots.

There’s a lot of reasons that the US has to keep importing in doctors and nurses at lower end of market rates while our medical costs as a system soar into unaffordability and bleed into increasing costs for every single other private sector possible. If Big Oil did this they’d be practicing racketeering and price gouging in the open.

It's like Debeers and their practice of hoarding diamonds to artificially inflate their value.

"If the college isn't accredited it's no good" is such "common knowledge" that even saying it out loud feels foolish, but overlooks that the education is what's most important, followed by the social contacts that you make along the way.

If a non-accredited college offered more rigorous education and produced superior students at a fraction of the cost than the average state college, then why should a handful of fuddie-duddies with no incentive to investigate get to decide that the college is worthless?

Of course, it's easy to envision a competent college, where hard science, math, history and arts are taught by talented educators adhering to a rigorous syllabus, but implementing it and preventing students from cheating their way through and mucking the whole system up is a different story altogether.

shouldn't college accreditation be done by govt?

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