> I don't think the student who who attend a trade school like this would care in the slightest that it isn't accredited.

They will if they want to claim tax credits, take out a loan to pay for the education, gain discounts on insurance, continue their education later, and so on.

But if a student doesn’t care about the degree what is the point of going to that school? Would it be cheaper and faster to go to a normal trade school that just teaches trades?

True it takes time, as student outcomes and testimonials are part of the accreditation process. But that doesn’t change the calculus for new students. It’s kind of a catch-22, but necessarily so.

Can’t speak for the east coast, but the west coast accreditation organization (I forget the name) has a fairly clear set of standards for accreditation that boil down to:

1. Facilities required for accreditation (library, labs, offices, etc)

2. Degree programs and learning objectives (e.g. Bachelors of Computer Science and a list of competencies said degree asserts)

3. Processes and procedures, particularly around course management and curriculum. A big part of this is mapping out your listed degree requirements to classes that either provide those competencies or provide building blocks required for those competencies. E.g. Calc -> Lambda Calc -> Category Theory to provide a lot of fundamental math skills for a proposed CS curriculum.

EDIT: found them—the Western Association of Schools and Colleges is the organization that performs accreditations of colleges in California: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Association_of_Schoo...

I saw a university accrediting its new engineering department during a tour. It is a bunch of bueracracy and standards as opposed to something adhoc and fiefdom style. In that case the first few waves of graduates were conditionally accredited as graduates were required to accredit. Standards here seemed to be aligned in interests - they want to preserve reputations more than gatekeep. Given the sheer university volume gatekeeping is a dubious approach anyway.

> accreditation agencies are neutral, or if they're going to say "well, you're not a real school, so we're not going to accredit you."

Saying "you're not a real school, so we're not going to accredit you" is literally the sole job of an accreditation agency. Well, that and figuring out how to define a "real school".