“Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!” — Dr. Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters
About two years ago, a funny thing happened in California. I know, crazy things happen there all the time, but this one was a very unusual occurrence in the recent history of higher education. What happened was that the authorization and funding stopped for the state agency that oversees higher education, and as a result it ceased to exist.
To explain what this means, I should explain that colleges and universities in the U.S. are typically approved to operate by the state or territory where they exist, and then, on top of that, most are also accredited by a private accrediting organization. When we talk about regional accreditors, or national accreditors, or accrediting bodies recognized by CHEA and/or the U.S. Department of Education, we're talking about private organizations that schools don't usually legally have to go to for approval just to operate. It's the first step, that state license, that's the legal basis for operating and for awarding degrees.
Anyway, so two years ago there stopped being any state oversight of most kinds of higher education in California. This makes it the only place in the U.S. where it's perfectly okay for anyone to just open a school, just like that. No permission, no paperwork, no red tape, just a willingness to put together a curriculum and make it available to students. This has horrified a number of observers who cannot imagine a world in which schools for grownups can operate without state oversight. They have been waiting to see whether California would create a new oversight agency, and while there was a bill to that effect in the state legislature, it seems to have been placed on indefinite hold.
The objections raised here mostly center on how easy it is to set up a degree mill when there's no state agency stopping you. No one likes degree mills, and I'm no exception. But stopping them through state oversight is a tiresome game of whack-a-mole that can't ever truly be won, and with fifty states with varying requirements it's difficult to say what state approval really means anyway. It makes more sense for students, employers, and other interested parties to be responsible, and check on their own to see whether a school has the academic reputation that meets their needs. If one is looking for accredited schools, for example, it's trivially easy to check with CHEA to see whether a school is regionally or nationally accredited: click here if you want to see for yourself. Or, even better, one can consult with services like eLearners where all the listed schools are accredited.
One of the things that gets me are the dire predictions that California is becoming the go-to place for degree mills to set up shop, and that this will damage the state's reputation. But there's been no oversight for two years now, and no one is saying, "There's no way I'd go to Stanford — it's in California, where they have all those fake schools!" In fact, despite how much time has passed I haven't heard of a tsunami of degree mills arriving there yet.
Some might ask, if every other state requires licensing of higher education, and California used to do it, then what's the harm if they start it back up? There are two things to consider. One is that a state agency is never free. Californians, already notoriously overtaxed, would have to spend money on this either through general taxation or through fees. The other is that by letting people act freely California now has an environment where small scale educational entrepreneurs can safely set up small niche schools that meet the needs of only a few students.
There's a saying that if something isn't broken, don't fix it. Right now the system in California is not to have a system, and it doesn't seem broken. Hopefully they won't fix it any time soon.
Next up, my family starts moving to using free software.