DeVos reinstated for-profit college accreditor despite staff objections, report shows
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos earlier this year reinstated an accreditor of for-profit colleges despite findings by her agency’s career staff that the organization failed to meet federal standards, an internal document shows.
The report, released by the Education Department on Friday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, shows that career department analysts had serious concerns about restoring the federal recognition of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools just a month before DeVos issued an order reinstating the accreditor’s federal status.
Career analysts wrote in the report that ACICS failed to meet 57 of the 93 criteria that accreditors are required to meet under federal law. The Obama administration’s termination of ACICS in 2016 was based on its findings that the accreditor had not followed 21 of the standards, though its review was more limited in scope.
The March 2018 report — known as a “draft staff analysis” — concluded that the Trump administration should not reinstate ACICS.
A month later, in April, DeVos restored the federal powers of ACICS after a federal judge ruled that the Obama administration illegally failed to consider relevant evidence in its 2016 decision to terminate the accreditor. DeVos reinstated the accreditor while she makes a longer-term decision on its fate.
Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill suggested in an email that the department was forced to reinstate ACICS by the court’s ruling. She said the department “can’t operate on or enforce a decision that was found invalid by the court. “
“The Secretary did not make the determination to reinstate ACICS,” Hill said. “A judge ruled that the previous administration failed to consider 36,000 pages of relevant evidence before making its decision to withdraw ACICS’s recognition as an accreditor and remanded the case back to the Secretary.”
Though the judge in the case ruled that there were legal deficiencies with the Obama administration’s decision-making process, he rejected ACICS’ request that he order the Education Department to reinstate the accreditor. He ruled that the case be sent back to the secretary for further consideration.
Hill said that the department is not considering the March 2018 draft staff report because it was “part of ACICS’s 2017 petition for initial recognition which has been rendered moot by the court’s order.”
Critics of ACICS have said it has served as a rubber stamp for too many dishonest and poor-performing for-profit colleges to access federal funding. The accreditor most notably approved the Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech chains of schools until their collapse amid allegations of fraud and predatory practices.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) this year also raised concerns about several of the schools that ACICS approved, criticizing the “lax oversight” of institutions he said were operating as “visa mills.”
“It’s no wonder that ACICS and Secretary DeVos didn’t want this report to come out,” said Alex Elson, senior counsel at the National Student Legal Defense Network, which sued to release it on behalf of the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank. “Clearly, she was well aware that ACICS was getting worse, not better, and has been working to help them anyway.”
In an unusual statement included as part of the department’s official FOIA response, the Office of Postsecondary Education, currently led by DeVos appointee Frank Brogan, pushed back against the significance of the report.
The statement called the report “an incomplete, pre-decisional document that may include errors of fact or omissions on the part of staff analysts,” who did not have the opportunity to receive a response or additional information from ACICS.
ACICS has also said that it believes that the career staff analysis contains inaccuracies, though it hasn’t publicly said what it believes is incorrect.
The release of the report comes after a weekslong tug of war over the document among the Education Department, the Century Foundation and the accreditor itself, which had been seeking to block the release of the report. ACICS earlier this week abandoned its legal effort to stop the department from disclosing the document.
Michelle Edwards, the organization’s president, said in a statement this week that ACICS still believes that releasing the document amounts to “a dangerous aberration from historical practice — one that jeopardizes the frank and constructive exchange of information between the Department and all accreditors.”
But, she said, the organization had decided to withdraw its objections after it submitted additional information to the department May 30. That submission, she said, included information to correct “numerous inaccuracies in the Draft Staff Report” as well as other materials that the organization believes “clearly demonstrate our compliance with recognition standards.”
Edwards said in an email Friday that ACICS did not plan to release its May 30 submission “at this point in the deliberative process.” She said the “submission detailed our position that ACICS has demonstrated that we are currently in full compliance with the areas noted in the December 2016 letter from the Secretary which is under review.”