Shifting Alliances in the Accreditation of Higher Education: On the ...

as strong as existing codes. Accountability, which is discussed more thoroughly later, is
here used to describe the transparency of monitoring. Finally, complementarity refers to
whether or not nongovernmental regulatory systems are consistent with pre-existing
government regulation. 52
All four of these four criteria may be applied to the accreditation system, at least
in theory, to determine whether or not it is an appropriate method of regulation. In fact,
the issue of rigor is one of the primary objections that has been made concerning the
accreditation system; there is a large and vocal community that feels the current system is
inadequate precisely because standards are not measurable. The issue of legitimacy is
central to the criticism that a large segment of the postsecondary education community,
most particularly the proprietary schools, is not well represented within the accreditation
system. Accountability is also an issue as many have complained of a lack of
transparency in the accreditation process and want the results of monitoring activities to
be made public. Finally, complimentarity has been an ongoing concern for postsecondary
education; in fact, it was largely as a result of the inability of state governments to
coordinate their own licensing efforts. The issue of complementarity is particularly
relevant to understanding the controversy over the 1992 Amendments to the Higher
Education Act, as will be discussed in a later section.
Sinclair observes that government regulation and industry self-regulation are not
mutually exclusive but, rather, depend on each other to work. In particular, he notes that
the threat of future government regulation often acts as a strong incentive for industries to
52 O‘Rourke, ―Outsourcing Regulation,‖ 25.
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