Accreditation’s Accurate, Misleading Price Tag
A number can be accurate and still give us the wrong answer. When a striking or memorable figure becomes a proxy for a more complex problem, it can inadvertently draw policy discussion away from the underlying issues. This often results in discourse that is distracting rather than productive. The cost of college accreditation offers a timely example.
We are closely watching the Department of Education’s August 2026 proposal designed to make accreditation more accountable, and now waiting for a final rule probably in early November. With so much at stake and so many opinions, it can be difficult to know what to pay attention to, and equally difficult not to get distracted by misleading data that create a perception of confidence.
One authoritative figure comes from a study published in 2015 by Vanderbilt University that found that institutions across the country spend $3.4 billion on institutional accreditation every year. That is a powerful number: large, confident, and provocative. It received a lot of press at the time and has been cited as part of the current debate.
This is a direct illustration of how important it is to interpret data responsibly. In fact, the real fiscal cost is much lower. Through my dissertation studies (which, coincidentally, concluded just a few years before the Vanderbilt study was published), I found an average institutional cost of $327,254 over a 7 to 10 year cycle. That annualizes to somewhere between $32,725 and $46,751 per year. Consider the Vanderbilt figure brought to the same terms: $3.4 billion spread across roughly 3,500 institutions that undergo regional accreditation comes to about $971,000 per institution per year. Importantly, both figures account for cost like staff time. That estimate is 20 to 30 times higher than the one I made.
How is the difference so substantial? The Vanderbilt study answers a different question than the one most people think it answers. The larger figure is derived by measuring accreditation as a small share of overall institutional spending at 13 schools and scaling that percentage across the sector. That makes it a measure of how much institutions spend as opposed to what accreditation itself costs an institution to undergo. And yet the big number is the one that sticks, even among higher education professionals. The biggest cost and the true toll of accreditation is the time and energy involved, the burden carried by the people executing it.
The challenge is that it is extraordinarily difficult to quantify that burden, meaning that inevitably the actual burden is more asserted than measured. The “big” number is misleading, but it feels right because it better represents the burden. A confidently asserted figure has driven a national policy narrative in unhelpful ways. Regardless of one’s opinion on the matter, invoking a figure like this is more sensational than helpful.
As we anticipate a federal decision about accreditation policy, let us debate responsibly. We need to ensure that we keep data in the right context, and that we are using them to answer the appropriate questions. This will be especially important as we turn our attention to the critical work that follows: measuring the success of the reform, whichever direction it ends up going.
