In this report for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, our President Stig Leschly and Researcher Yazmin Guzman analyze the actions of accreditors in Texas along two primary dimensions – overseeing college quality and approving new colleges.
The vast majority of college students in the US attend a college that is more than 40 years old, and few new 2YR and 4YR colleges have been accredited in the past 20 years. These are two of the findings from our analysis of the age of US colleges and the process of new college accreditation.
America is home to more than 6000 colleges serving about 19M students. College accreditors are tasked with overseeing the academic quality of these colleges and with serving as gatekeepers of federal financial aid for them. We wanted to understand how often accreditors take action to discipline colleges for poor student outcomes or questionable academic programming.
The Postsecondary Commission dove deep into this new data set to examine the earnings of graduates from Massachusetts colleges. In our analysis, we partnered with Michael Itzkowitz, Senior Fellow at Third Way, who has analyzed college earnings data extensively.
