The responsible choice? Some considerations in choosing between accredited and self-regulating universities

CER Report

Faced with the multitude of online programs offered by universities, how does the consumer make a responsible choice? Quality has become a buzzword in contemporary university marketing, along with the word "accreditation". Yet the more the state shouts about quality and "consumer protection", the more it becomes clear that its statements concerning quality are not actually about quality at all.

"The credibility of voluntary accreditation has sunk so low that we have to do something dramatic if it's going to survive."
Dr Robert E. Atwell, President, American Council on Education, January 28, 1994

Professor James Tooley of the University of Newcastle in the UK puts the argument directly,

"Once a brand name becomes formed and known, customers — parents and children — have to be reassured about the quality of the service on offer. This government, and the previous one, thinks that the only way parents can be thus reassured is to have a hugely expensive and cumbersome apparatus of nationalised curriculum, nationalised testing, nationalised inspection, nationalised targets and nationalised league tables. But the problem with these state surveillance measures is that they become politicised. So, for example, instead of it being a matter of educational importance which testing procedures are used, what works best and what is most effective at raising standards, it becomes a matter of finding testing procedures which pass political muster; similarly the politically correct inspection procedures are mired in subjectivity and waffle. And throughout it all, mediocre schools can acquiesce in their mediocrity, and can always blame central or local government, or the class of children in the school, without addressing their own incompetence. In the for-profit private education sector, such an approach is not an option. The schools or colleges have as their raison d’être the provision of quality educational services. If they don’t do this, they’ll go out of business.
[Source: James Tooley, "Should the Private Sector Profit from Education? The Seven Virtues of Highly Effective Markets", Libertarian Alliance, Educational Notes no. 31, available here.]

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