If you're speaking of college admissions, i agree, and certainly hope the barriers would be high.
After all, one would want an education for the outlandish sum of money they paid.
--my wife is a pharmacist. She started out her work career as a pharmacist with a $200,000+ student loan debt...that she paid off in six years.
One would certainly HOPE that her education dealt with PHARMACY, and not Title IX bovine scatology.
Having strict private standards...BTW, Underwriters Laboratories is an industry funded double blind organisation, and without that UL sticker, your product is in serious trouble...would make everyone sit up and take notice.
The same type of "industry standard" applied to private higher education would put an end to a lot of nonsense.
No, barrier to entry to the accreditation business.
Accreditation associations must be recognized by the federal government for 1) their accreditation to have any meaning with schools that seek accreditation, 2) for schools accredited by the accrediting body to be eligible to receive funds from the government in terms of Pell grants, student loan proceeds, GI Bill benefits, or, in some cases, tuition paid from reimbursement money given to students from the students’ employers, and other sources.
There are six regional accreditation associations, controlled by member schools, and that act as a cartel. They work hand-in-hand with the federal government to keep out the competition.
There are a number of national accreditation associations. Folks can start their own national associations, unlike with regionals associations. The nationals are considered to have “lower” than the regional associations. Using that as an excuse, schools with regional accreditation often don’t accept credits earned at institutions that nationally accredited. Who determines that the nationals have “lower” standards? The regionals.
To create an accreditation association that will provide its accredited institutions with an accreditation that will generally be accepted as a real seal of quality, an accreditation association would need to overcome the non-economic barriers to entry posed by the six regional accreditors, and, to overcome the issues of “lower” quality, would have to largely emulate the standards of the regionals.
Much of the cost of running a college or university comes from meeting standards that are very costly, even if they don’t have much to do with quality. And much of the cost of developing and running an accreditation body with comparable “standards” to the existing regionals is wrapped up in enforcing the standards on colleges and universities required to emulate the regionals.