For-profit colleges’ accreditation in peril
Dozens of for-profit colleges in South Florida could lose accreditation after a federal decision to strip authority from the agency that approved them.
Schools, including the Florida Technical College, Digital Media Arts College and the Lincoln Technical Institute, must agree to increased government oversight and apply to a new accreditation agency if they wish to keep their status.
That label is required to continue receiving federal student aid. Accredited schools also are more likely to attract high-quality faculty and students and are more likely to get permission to add academic programs than those that are not, said Curtis Austin, director of Florida Association of Postsecondary Schools and Colleges.
Students who finish their diplomas within the next 18 months will not be affected as long as their colleges agree to additional monitoring, transparency, oversight and accountability measures. The move will not compromise the quality of their diplomas, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
About 250 institutions receiving federal student aid earned accreditation through the agency determined unfit to oversee them. More than 100 career colleges in Florida bear the agency’s seal of approval, Curtis said.
The U.S. Department of Education said the agency, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, failed to properly monitor the institutions it approved and was too lax on student achievement standards, among other violations.
“What this decision reflects is the fact that ACICS was an agency that for years was little more than a rubber stamp for some highly problematic colleges,” said Ben Miller, senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress.
His Washington, D.C.-based organization released a report in June that found 90 instances when the agency named campuses or colleges to its honor roll about the same time the state or federal government was investigating them.
That included FastTrain College in Miami. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint against the institution in 2014, saying that it hired strippers and attractive women to persuade men to enroll. The former president was later convicted of stealing millions in federal financial aid, according to the report.
“It gets named on [the agency’s] honor roll, and a year later it’s being raided by the FBI for fraud,” Miller said.
The council also accredited Corinthian Colleges, which was ordered in March to pay more than $1 billion for defrauding its students.
The agency appealed the Department of Education’s decision, but Secretary John B. King Jr. rejected it, writing that the council “is not capable of coming into compliance within 12 months or less.” It has appealed the decision in federal court.
Advocates for the agency argue that the decision is an unfair slight on the for-profit college industry that will shutter independent schools across the nation.
Colleges under the agency’s watch do not automatically lose their status: they have 18 months to find another agency to accredit them before the government cuts off their financial aid as long as they agree to follow federal requirements in the meantime.
Florida Technical College, for example, is currently pursuing accreditation through a different agency, said James Michael Burkett, president.
But Steve Gunderson, president and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities, said many schools won’t be able to earn accreditation in time.
Getting new accreditation costs up to $50,000 per campus, a price tag that may doom some institutions on its own, he said.
And theres’s no guarantee that they’ll secure the status. Other accreditation agencies will be overloaded with requests from schools searching to regain their status, he said.
“Because of the number of schools accredited by ACICS, there is no way that all of these schools can transfer their accreditation during an 18-month period,” he said.