If you have been following along, you have seen that we have thrown out the common features of today’s universities one after another. Today, we will continue this process. We will throw out accreditation.
What is accreditation? What is it for? Do you need it? What if you don’t have it?
Most people today probably think that, if a college doesn’t have accreditation, then the activities that take place there don’t count. If you read a book at an accredited institution, then it “counts,” and if it is not accredited, then it “doesn’t count.” It’s the same book.
Let us ask: who decides whether it “counts”? Who cares if a college is accredited or not? Employers might care. Some of them still have education requirements, although these are being dropped. But, many readers here are in the private sector. If a person got a high-quality education, and you could confirm that they got a high-quality education and it was adequately described and documented, would it matter to you if this institution was “accredited” or not? Maybe it would, but in most situations, probably it wouldn’t. And for those places where it really was important, the typical graduate of our college probably wouldn’t want to work there anyway.
What about graduate schools? People who have established unaccredited colleges have found that graduate schools don’t really care much about accreditation, as long as it can be confirmed and documented that a student really did study certain topics. For technical subjects (such as math, accounting or pre-med courses), there are often standardized tests you could take. For other courses such as History, graduate schools are not so picky as long as it is clear that you took it seriously and worked hard at it. If you wanted to get a Ph.D in History at Yale University, they would probably be interested in seeing your undergraduate papers, and maybe a list of books you read, and a recommendation from your Teacher. Students of these unaccredited colleges did not have much of a problem with graduate school admissions.
What about other colleges? One basic purpose of accreditation is to establish “credits.” Basically, it makes college education homogenous and interchangeable. You took five course credits in Psychology at an accredited institution. This can be transferred to an equivalent five course credits at some other institution. But, there are also standardized tests for many college subjects, including the CLEP Exams. And, you could probably get at least partial credit if you can document that you really did study a subject with some intensity and commitment, under the supervision of a Teacher. In any case, this is only important if you are trying to transfer to another institution, which supposedly you don’t want to do, or you would already be going there instead of our alternative College. Maybe it would be important if your Teacher dies in an automobile accident.
And so, it turns out that nobody needs accreditation. So, why is it so important? Simple: an institution needs accreditation (today) to get access to funding from loans and grants. Federal loans, and also bank loans, are not available for students who go to unaccredited institutions. Also, there are a lot of grants of various sorts, for both Students and institutions, that would not be available. But, our College is already pretty cheap as it is, so our students would need much less financial aid and loans anyway. Maybe having no availability to lending is a good thing. This may extend even to grants. It is said: He who pays the piper calls the tune. When an institution is conforming itself to the wishes of grant providers, it is, inevitably, compromising the special vision and purpose that has inspired the College in the first place. We can make an exception to very special financial backers who share the Vision of the founders of our College. But, inevitably, these donors won’t care about accreditation anyway.
We have seen that accreditation is focused on homogeneity. It is what allows a student to take Five Credits at one college, and transfer them to another. It is all the same, or nearly so. As part of his homogeneity, Five Credits might be defined as a certain number of hours of class time, in a Subject, and so forth. This is a problem for a college that has no lectures, no classes and no subjects.
Thus, we find that not only is accreditation unnecessary, it is actually poison: it is a system that would force you to be just like all the other institutions. Actually, you could have a sort of college that follows the accreditation format (the Prussian University model of Specialists and Departments), and is still worthwhile. Hillsdale College is one example of that. But, we couldn’t begin with a Special Man and a bookshelf. Probably, it would require a ton of money upfront.
One part of the accreditation process is, of course, maintaining educational standards. Let’s say that a college has a Department of Economics. (This requires a Department with Specialists — the Prussian University model.) The accreditation agency, from time to time, has a review of the Department of Economics to make sure that it is doing an adequate job of teaching Economics. This is typically done by a board of other professors of Economics, from other universities. Let’s say that we have a board of these professors, who perhaps have a review of our Special Man, or other such Special People of our college, to see if they meet the requirements of accreditation of the Department of Economics. You can imagine how well that would go. Pretty soon we are bowing and scraping to the accreditation board.
In practice, accreditation, and other requirements of accessing Federal grants and loans, and other such things, gets a lot more complicated than that. One of the reasons for the profusion of non-teaching academic administrators since 1960 is to handle the profusion of new requirements from the Federal government and many other sources. Colleges need counselors for drug abuse or sexual harassment. They need policies for “diversity” (racial quotas) and feminist yadda yadda, and LGBTQ and on and on and on. And, to get accreditation, the college has to bow and scrape before all these demands. It’s poison. Throw it out.
The regulatory environment for colleges is largely set at the State level. In New York State, to be considered a “degree-granting institution,” you have to be accredited. But, you can also set up as just a school of general education, and leave the college-university regulatory framework completely. This “school of general education” falls into the regulatory framework of other schools such as might teach ballet or auto repair. If a school offers some kind of standardized certification or occupational licensing, such as an “AHA-certified Level I hairdresser,” then there are some requirements related to that. But, the only requirements for a “school of general education” is that there is a facility of a certain minimum size. A room. And, it costs a little money to set up, under $15,000. Another problem of becoming a “degree-granting institution” in New York State is that your institution is categorized as a division of the State University of New York. A division. This means that they own you, down to the smallest detail, and can tell you what to do and what not to do. They can even grab your endowment on a whim. Because, it is actually their endowment, not yours. Run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit.
I know of one college that established itself along the lines we are describing here. (It was the model, in many ways, for what I am describing.) It had a good fifteen years where everything went well, without accreditation. They had about fifty students on average, during that time, with a peak of about 150 (the common size of colleges before 1880 and the Prussian University model). The students were able to get jobs, or go to graduate schools, without any major issues regarding accreditation. At one point, the college decided to try to get accreditation, as it would provide access to loans, grants and so forth. This tore the institution apart, and in two years it dissolved.
This private businessman, a Libertarian, set up a new college, Thales College, in 2019. This is actually his second school venture; Thales Academy, started in 2007, offers K-12 education. It started with five students. It now has eight locations, 3000 students, and charges $6,000 a year.
He started a charter school in 1998, and a Catholic school in 2001. The charter, Franklin Academy, is the third largest in North Carolina, with four applicants vying for every one kindergarten spot. But, in Luddy’s view, charters have limited potential for disruption because state regulators won’t consent to radical approaches.
Thales College costs $10,667 per year.
Some applicants, however, will be turned off by the offering of a single program with no electives, a Bachelor of Liberal Arts, with set courses offered in Western literature, ethics, math, logic, economics, and finance.
Luddy’s decision to offer a fixed curriculum grew out of his experiences hiring talent at CaptiveAire. What “some of these graduates of engineering programs don’t know is shocking,” he says. The best employees, in his view, learn on the job and through their own initiative. “One of the top three engineers in our company never went to engineering school,” Luddy says. His focus is on creating self-starters.
Thales College won’t seek accreditation because doing so would be a “hindrance,” says Dr. Timothy Hall, who will serve as the school’s director of operations and academics. Accrediting institutions require that colleges have research libraries and a certain number of Ph.D.s on their faculty, according to Hall. Luddy sees college research libraries as a waste of money in the online age, and Hall says that the school will hire the best teachers, whether they have doctorate degrees or not. …
And what are the anticipated consequences of this lack of accreditation?
Lack of accreditation means students won’t be eligible for federal loans, and if they decide to transfer schools, other accredited institutions may decline to honor the credits they’ve accrued. Hall says that won’t be a problem. “We’re confident they’ll be able to transfer credits,” he says, because other institutions generally ask for syllabi to evaluate the quality of another school’s courses. Hall’s “not sure” if not being accredited will disqualify Thales alums from admission to some graduate programs, but anticipates that most will go right into the workforce. This is a school “for entrepreneurs.”
How big is this college going to be?
Thales College will accept 45 students in its inaugural class, with ambitious expansion plans if the model is successful. In Luddy’s view, ending all federal subsidies would be the fastest and most effective way to upend higher education. But that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Societal change comes not through advocacy, but via “exit:” Create alternatives and people will vote with their wallets.
Since Thales runs for three years of 45 weeks instead of four years of 30 weeks, this means 3×45=135 students in total.
You probably began this topic thinking that accreditation was absolutely necessary. But, actually, it is absolute poison. No accreditation, please.
