HISTORY OF PROMISED IMPROVEMENTS IN THE GATEKEEPING PROCESS There has been a great deal of congressional testimony on the subject of gatekeeping, particularly leading up to the 1992 HEA Amendments. In 1990, thenSecretary of Education Lauro Cavazos told the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs: "We believe that focusing more on performance, strengthening In October 1993, Assistant Secretary for the Office of Postsecondary Education, Dr. David Longanecker, promised the same Senate Subcommittee major improvement in the gatekeeping process by using authorities in the 1992 HEA Amendments to beef up the accreditation and certification processes, particularly with regard to the problem school sector institutions. nonbaccalaureate vocational In July 1995, Assistant Secretary Longanecker again testified before the same Senate Subcommittee and promised a "new approach for oversight reform,” a centerpiece of which was a targeting by the Department of resources in the gatekeeping area and elsewhere on "for-profit institutions providing short-term training." Have the promised improvements materialized? In general, I can report that there has been improvement in those areas where Congress has legislated clear, bright-line standards or requirements for the Department to implement without much discretion, for example, the requirement for audited financial statements from participating schools. However, where the law has deferred to outside entities, such as accrediting agencies, to set and enforce standards, much more improvement is needed. ACCREDITING AGENCIES -- RELUCTANT TO SET AND ENFORCE MEANINGFUL PERFORMANCE STANDARDS Accrediting agencies are one-third of the tripartite gatekeeping process, along with the Department and the states. The accreditation process is conducted by private accrediting agencies, which under the HEA are to be determined by the Secretary to be "reliable authorit[ies] as to the quality of education or training offered" by institutions that participate in the SFA programs. Thus, under the current statutory scheme, accreditation is supposed to ensure the quality of training so that students and taxpayers get their money's worth from the training purchased. History of Concern Regarding Accreditation Process In testimony before congressional committees going back to 1990, OIG has repeatedly expressed its concern that the accreditation process does not reliably ensure institutional educational quality for vocational trade schools. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which had held extensive hearings on weaknesses in the SFA programs, issued its report on Abuses in Federal Student Aid Programs in May 1991. The report recommended that accrediting agencies be eliminated as a part of the gatekeeping process unless, under the leadership of the Department, the agencies dramatically improved their ability to screen out substandard schools. The report further recommended that the Department "should be required to develop minimum uniform quality assurance standards, with which all recognized accrediting bodies that accredit proprietary schools must comply. The Department should be responsible not only for formulating those standards, but also for developing and carrying out a meaningful review and verification process designed to enforce compliance with those standards. If the Secretary determines that an accrediting body does not or cannot meet these requirements, recognition should be terminated." 1992 HEA Amendments In the 1992 HEA Amendments, Congress sought to address the need for specific accreditation and institutional performance standards. Section 496 directed the Department to establish standards for recognizing accrediting agencies as reliable authorities as to the quality of education or training offered. The 1992 HEA Amendments also required the accrediting agencies to have institutional review standards in twelve areas. While many of these areas were previously included in the law, the required standards for student outcomes were a new addition. In fact, the law stated that "such standards shall require that" accrediting agencies assess institutional "success with respect to student achievement in relation to its mission, including, as appropriate, consideration of course completion, State licensing examination, and job placement rates." We believe that by requiring the Department to "set standards" for evaluating accrediting agencies in specified areas, Congress was directing the Department to put meat on the bare-bones statutory language in order to ensure that the agencies had meaningful, quantifiable and enforceable standards for their member schools. Department Action Since the 1992 HEA Amendments It appeared that the Department was on the same track when Assistant Secretary Longanecker told the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in 1993, in reference to the proposed regulations: "The Department will soon publish proposed regulations for In our opinion, the Department's final accrediting agency regulations did not fulfill this promise. The final regulations simply restated the statutory language of the 1992 HEA Amendments without giving the accrediting agencies additional direction for setting meaningful standards or requiring that those standards be enforced against member schools that do not meet them. The stated rationale was that the Department must regulate "closely to the law" to avoid "regulation-driven management." In addition to the Department's efforts to minimize regulation, the accrediting agencies expressed an unwillingness to develop and enforce meaningful, objective standards because of their belief that it would inappropriately make them federal regulators. This demonstrates why we believe Congress must legislate 43-818 97-3 |