Something Rotten at AIU?

As Higher Ed Watch, The Chronicle, and others reported last week, the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Education recently sent a sharply-worded letter to the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, objecting to HLC’s recent decision to accredit for-profit American InterContinental University (AIU), a subsidiary of the Career Education Corporation.

Why is the IG’s office so concerned? The scary truth is right there in the letter. Here are some of the choicest excerpts:

Specifically, HLC found that AIU’s REDACTED. Despite these issues, HLC granted AIU full initial accreditation with no limitations on the programs it offered at the time of initial accreditation. This action by HLC is not in the best interests of students and calls into question whether the accrediting decisions made by HLC should be relied upon by the Department of Education when assisting students to obtain quality education through the Title IV programs.

Shocking, shocking stuff. And there’s more:

In its “Report of a Comprehensive Evaluation Visit for Initial Accreditation, the found REDACTED. Specifically, the team found REDACTED. Significant portions of the team’s findings are quoted below: REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED. The team provided detailed support for its findings: REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED. The team also found that REDACTED. The team’s review of REDACTED. The team found that REDACTED. The team also stated that REDACTED. The team concluded that REDACTED. The team ultimately concluded that REDACTED.

Of course, AIU wasn’t going to take this lying down:

On April 3, 2009, AIU’s Chancellor submitted AIU’s response to the team report. In the response, AIU’s chancellor states that REDACTED. AIU’s response REDACTED.

And so on. The memo reads like what you’d get if you filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA about correspondence with the Office of the Vice President regarding weapons of mass destruction circa December 2002. They must have ordered extra black magic markers for this letter alone.

So we’re left with the understanding that the IG’s office is upset about HCL accrediting American InterContintental despite some kind of something involving awarding credits for non-traditional online courses. Is this a terrible outrage being covered up by an overly compliant accreditor, or a case of the Department overstepping its bounds? Who knows? I’m on the record with concerns about how accreditation might be stymying innovative online models. Then again, AIU might be running a diploma mill-like scam; it wouldn’t be the first time they ended up in hot water.

At the end of the letter, the Inspector General says the following:

We provided a draft of this alert memorandum to OPE [the federal Office of Postsecondary Education], HLC, and AIU…Both HLC and AIU disagreed with our conclusions and objected to released of the alert memorandum in general and to information related to the team report in particular…The initial publication of this report will redact information that we have concluded qualifies as “confidential, commercial information” under 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(4) at the request of HLC and AIU.

There’s a lot of talk about higher education accountability these days. A common response to calls for more transparency is “We have lots of transparency already! Our accreditation report is right there for everyone to see.” And technically, most of the time, that’s true. Except accreditation reports tend to be written like this:

…To remind the institution of a second monitoring report due, documenting detailed evidence of ongoing compliance with Standard 3, including (1) final audited financial statements and associated management letter(s) for FY 07, (2) evidence that the institution is in full compliance with U.S. Department of Education financial guidelines, meets the Department’s financial ratio criteria, and has resolved internal control issues identified within previous year OMB Circular A-133 audit reports, (3) evidence that the institution is continuing to satisfy its bank covenants…management discussion and analysis and appropriate ratio analyses to support financial statements…evidence of ongoing compliance with Standard 8 (Student Admissions and Retention) including use of systematic evidence of the effectiveness of each recruitment and retention strategy to refine recruitment and retention plans…

…aafkjda;90[90saj243rn……….zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz………seriously, I’m sure this makes sense to the people within the accreditor and the college itself, but it’s not public disclosure in any meaningful sense. And when the accreditor actually finds evidence of something so bad that it prompts a letter that, adjusting for the conventions of government correspondence, practically qualifies as hate mail, all the key parts get blacked out. In other words, accreditation is nominally transparent right up to the point where there’s something the public actually needs to know, and then not.

Moreover, what exactly is this “confidential, commercial information” exception to FOIA supposed to mean? Is the information objectively confidential, like the formula for Classic Coke? Or is it just confidential in the “we’d rather people didn’t know about this because if they found out our stock price is going to tank” sense? Because if it’s the latter — and I strongly suspect it is — that is just straight-up obfuscation, and a troubling consequence of the growing role of for-profit companies in higher education.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s perfectly okay for people to make a profit providing higher education by providing a high-quality service for a reasonable price. But as my colleague Ben Miller recently pointed out, many for-profit universities are hugely dependent on public funding, received indirectly via publicly subsidized student financial aid, to stay in business. That’s why they have to be accredited in the first place! In exchange for all that money, the taxpayers deserve more than a sea of black ink.