Accrediting agencies, the private gatekeepers tasked by the U.S. Department of Education to issue licenses that make colleges eligible for student financial aid, sometimes send letters to schools listing violations and penalties. When posted online, these letters help the public, including students, understand developments and misconduct at the school. But recent actions involving the Accrediting Commission for Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC), the main accreditor for for-profit colleges, have moved things in the wrong direction, away from transparency and disclosure and toward further cover-ups of wrongdoing. This suggests the possibility that progress is being made.
For the past several years, letters from ACCSC to schools have enabled the public and students to learn about important issues regarding schools. The letters include: A letter to the now-closed Independence University explaining that ACCSC revoked its accreditation after years of school abuse. Florida Career College puts the shuttered company's remaining schools on “warning” status after the Department of Education moved to withdraw federal aid from the International Education Corporation (IEC) due to blatant violations. And although Atlantis University voluntarily shut down the offending branch, there were still significant violations that warranted warnings.
However, ACCSC and other accrediting bodies may make significant edits to these letters, and accrediting bodies often remove them from their public websites entirely once the issue is resolved. For example, both developments occurred in his October 2023 letter to ACCSC's Atlantis. The broken link is: here. (However, we I saved a copy. )
Recently, then republic report I wrote about IEC and atlantis Characters — apparently ACCSC teeth Post a summary of at least some of the letters online It is addressed to the institution rather than the letter itself, which means it is even less transparent to the public.
To make matters worse, even if the Department of Education obtains such a letter from an accrediting agency to an institution, it typically does not post it online.
A recent interaction I had with the Department's Freedom of Information Act office highlighted this issue.
ACCSC Process and procedure rulesCertification Standards, Section X(C)(2) states:
The board notifies the school and also provides the U.S. Department of Education, appropriate state licensing agencies, and other accrediting agencies with the notice and reason why the school is placed on probation or warning.
However, when I attempted to obtain an unredacted version of ACCSC's letter to Atlantis placing the school on ACCSC warning status under FOIA, the response from the department was that there was no corresponding record. It notified me and included the following explanation:
Note that the ACCSC has four levels of corrective action that are less severe than probation. These include regulations, increased monitoring, reporting and warnings. Authorities are not required to submit a determination to the Department unless these statuses are treated as equivalent to probation.
These answers from the ACCSC and the Department may not be entirely contradictory. Presumably, in the case of warning status, ACCSC provides reasons without providing an actual letter to each institution. However, at least these issues need to be clarified. In some cases, as in the case of Atlantis, the ACCSC sends important letters to institutions regarding potential violations and posts them online for the public to view, but the department says it does not intend to provide them to the department. is a cause for concern.
ACCSC's apparent shift from posting actual letters to posting summaries is also concerning, as is the department's failure to post online the letters it receives.
ACCSC Executive Director Michelle McCormis did not respond to requests to discuss these issues, nor did the Department of Education's press office.
The issue is another aspect of student advocates' concerns that the department is not providing enough transparency regarding higher education institutions. We have raised these issues with the Department for many years. The letter we sent Secretary Cardona In March 2021.
