Colorado’s young people are suffering under a higher education system that is deeply flawed. Over 50 percent of my peers have student loan debt amounting to $25,000 on average. Ten percent of young people in Colorado are unemployed and either struggling to find full-time work or giving up looking altogether.
As college costs continue to rise, life for my generation is only getting more difficult.
When it comes to higher education, young people need to be armed with the facts in order to make wiser decisions about our futures. But more information alone isn’t enough: We also need systemic reforms to the accreditation process.
Luckily, young Coloradans have a voice in former U.S. Sen. Hank Brown. Brown, who served as president of the University of Colorado and of the University of Northern Colorado, has seen firsthand how fundamental flaws plague the system of higher education as a whole. Not only do these entrenched problems affect young people by driving up college costs, but they also discourage innovation by protecting outdated forms of higher education.
Brown points to accreditation reform as the most crucial change that must be made to the higher education system in order to protect students and taxpayers. Currently, institutions are granted a seal of approval via a peer-review process in which an accreditor acts as gatekeeper to federal funding. Accreditation is only granted based on significant financial input from the institution seeking approval. A start-up program or higher education alternative will be unlikely to receive accreditation, as start-up capital is often limited.
As a student, you can only receive financial aid if you attend an accredited college or university. This greatly limits the options available to students seeking post-secondary education. Even worse, the accreditation system places no value whatsoever on student success rates after enrollment. This makes it extremely difficult to hold underperforming institutions accountable and offers students relatively little information on what they can expect from their chosen institutions.
Aside from being ineffective in measuring quality,
the current accreditation system has effectively turned higher education into a cartel. The regulators are also the regulated, creating an obvious conflict of interest. Guidelines and quality standards are not transparent and serve to prevent new institutions from successfully entering the education marketplace.
Brown explains in his recent paper that there is no room for educational innovation under the current system. Creative and entrepreneurial, my generation is interested in pursuing alternative routes to education that challenge the status quo. Thanks to the opaque accreditation system, however, we find ourselves stuck paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree that no longer serves as a job guarantee.
This is not to say that we should do away with accreditation altogether, but the process must be reformed. Transparency must be increased in order to create a system that empowers students, not well-connected institutions. If trade programs, online courses, internships, and other new forms of higher education could easily receive accreditation, young people would be given more choice and control over our futures. As the marketplace expands, greater competition will drive down tuition bills and start reducing the student debt burden in Colorado and beyond.
State Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, has supported similar higher education reform initiatives that hold colleges in Colorado to higher standards. He sponsored a bill that would implement performance-based funding mechanisms, such as incentives for higher graduation rates. Holding institutions accountable for student performance in this manner is a surprisingly new phenomenon.
While Sen. Lambert has begun to scratch the surface of reform and Brown has been working to educate prospective students on higher education’s short-comings, overarching reform to accreditation is the most desirable plan.
As student loan rates climb and youth unemployment remains unacceptably high, young people are desperate for a solution. The answer is not more regulation but rather a push to empower my generation. Let us reshape our educational futures by putting our entrepreneurial spirit to work. Hank Brown has recognized this in Colorado, and it is time our lawmakers put his plan into action.
Jonathan Lockwood, 25, is the Colorado State Director for Generation Opportunity, a youth advocacy organization.
