Before the federal government made the tremendous blunder of getting into the business of financing higher education, college accreditation was a sleepy system that almost nobody cared about. It was voluntary, a means for colleges to demonstrate that they were serious educational institutions and not degree mills. But once the feds decided to limit student-aid money only to accredited schools, the accreditors suddenly had a great deal of power. They were the gatekeepers for the gusher of student-aid money pouring out of Washington.

The accreditors were never any good at guaranteeing educational quality. Lots of pathetically weak courses were taught where disengaged students could pass without much effort at accredited schools, and they never caused any problem because the accreditors don’t concern themselves with such details. They look at inputs and policies, not the school’s standards and results. That’s why we so often hear about college grads who can hardly read and write any better than an average middle-school student.

Ah, but the accreditors decided to throw in with the “progressives” and use their power to dragoon reluctant schools into adopting leftist diversity policies. So now they aren’t just ineffectual, but downright harmful.

As Teresa Manning of the National Association of Scholars points out in this article, Representative Burgess Owens and some colleagues in the House have decided to do something about this problem. Inter alia, accreditors would be prohibited from demanding that schools adopt “diversity statements” from prospective faculty members.

I’m all in favor of this legislation, but it won’t get at the root of the problem. The way to do that is to brush aside accreditation and require that schools agree to repay the loans of students who enroll but don’t pay back their loans. This “skin in the game” rule would change the incentives of the colleges away from just accepting as many paying customers as possible and purporting to educate them with weak classes and lots of politicized dreck. Those that continue to do so would suffer the consequences.

The federal government should not be in the lending business for college students (or for anything else), but until the happy day when it stops ladling out money for college, the best way to prevent waste is to make the schools responsible.