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

Of course, this is a highly questionable premise. Government agencies are subject
to rent-seeking as well as political pressures and self-interest; it is difficult to conceive of
a situation in which government agencies would be truly unbiased when deciding
amongst the competing demands of various stakeholders. The point that the authors are
trying to make, however, is that because a public agent is primarily accountable to the
government and not to a private stakeholder, it will be more likely to remain unbiased
than a private agent, which may be exclusively dependent upon one stakeholder.
There are a few assumptions in Mattli and Büthe‘s hypothesis that must be
addressed. To begin with, there is an unstated assumption that the primary goals of the
two stakeholders do not coincide. This may be a valid assumption in most instances, but
in the case of accreditation it will be argued that when the federal government initially
delegated authority to the accreditation associations, the role that they wanted the
accreditation associations to play did not conflict in any obvious way with the goals of
the higher education community. Certainly one could argue that their goals were not
identical; the federal government was concerned primarily with distinguishing which
schools were legitimate and which were not so that they could put an end to the
tremendous amount of fraud that had been occurring since the passage of the GI Bill.
They used the accreditation associations as gate-keepers to federal funds. The higher
education community, however, had several uses for the accreditation system, not the
least of which was to assist in their own self-improvement. Nonetheless, the goals of the
federal government and those of the higher education community initially coincided very
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