Will Ratings Displace Accreditation? - Judith S. Eaton, President of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

All that the U.S. Department of Education has officially said to date is that the system will “help inform” accreditation -- and we do not know what this means. This is worrisome. Ratings create, in essence, a federal system of quality review of higher education, with the potential to upend the longstanding tradition of nongovernmental accreditation that has carried out this role for more than 100 years. And establishing the system may mean the end of more than 60 years of accreditation as a partner with government, the reliable authority on educational quality to which Congress and the Education Department have turned. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/03/31/federal-rating-system-could-displace-accreditation-judge-higher-ed-quality-essay