| Launching new institutions: Solving the chicken-or-egg problem in American higher educationOctober 2014
Sylvia Manning
American Enterprise Institute
Key points
- US higher education reformers have encouraged accreditors to change their standards and speed up their approval processes to accommodate innovative educational models, but this jeopardizes accreditation’s beneficial quality-assurance mechanisms.
- A major barrier to colleges and universities entering the higher education market is that as unaccredited institutions, they cannot enroll students with financial aid needs, but having students is a prerequisite for accreditation.
- A new system in which institutions can become provisionally approved for federal student financial aid before they achieve official accreditation could create a streamlined path for new institutions to enter the market.
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