What if Wirecutter Rated Universities?
One of the biggest myths in higher education, I tell parents, is that accreditation has anything to do with the quality of a college or university. It doesn’t, by law. Since the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, all an accreditor can do is rate student achievement by the standard each institution sets for itself. That means no accreditor looks at the quality of any of the ingredients that go into any college course or degree: not the professor, not the reading list, not the time spent mentoring or writing letters of recommendation. Nothing about what makes a college “good.”
“No accrediting agency or association may be determined by the Secretary to be a reliable authority as to the quality of education or training offered for the purposes of this chapter or for other Federal purposes” (20 U.S.C. §1099b(a))
What parents can’t get their heads around is how a college can be fully accredited, can cost more every year, and yet still be worse than it was when they went. I’ve watched this decline for twenty years and I’ve never been able to explain it in a way that sticks. Then I read last week’s viral New York Times Wirecutter story about Talenti gelato.
Times writer Annemarie Conte explained that she had been a Talenti loyalist since 2012. Like millions of consumers, she loved the fancy flavors that came in a distinctive, reusable see-through plastic container with the screw-top lid. So when the Wirecutter team blind-tasted the vanilla and ranked it subpar, “thin, gray, foamy,” Conte didn’t believe them. How could a quality product go downhill so fast? She interviewed the founder and a food scientist and tracked down old labels from friends who had kept old Talenti jars. She compared the listed ingredients over the past ten years. Many had changed, and not in a good way.
I want to make two comparisons here. First, no higher ed accreditors do anywhere near the kind of work Conte does. I’ve been involved in accreditation reviews at four universities over the past twenty years. Regarding academics, at least, it’s pretty much all paperwork. Here are pieces of paper with numbers of courses, learning outcomes, names of professors with degrees after their names. There’s no equivalent of a taste test. There’s no concern with quality, by law. So there’s no attention to whether things have gotten better or worse over time.
