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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

The university accreditation system is a cartel. You can't gain accreditation until you have already graduated students! So basically you have to find a group of students who are willing to risk studying at an unofficial university, then operate the university for several years before you can even apply for the stupid credential that allows you to issue degrees that anybody else recognizes. It clearly should be illegal, but like in so many other areas, the university system gets special treatment while continuing to suck up more and more resources for an ever diminishing return.

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Here's the question: who cares about accreditation?

I'm not trying to be flippant, this is an actual question.

Sure, getting a higher degree at another institution will have that requirement, as would a professional certification (medicine, law, professional engineering), but those are relatively narrow scopes.

Isn't it true that in most cases nobody is going to care or even know enough to check accreditation?

I mean, Carnegie Mellon was #2 in computer science in the nation at one point despite not being an accredited program because of their lack of mandatory calculus requirements

Maybe this is news to people in the software industry, but a whole bunch of highly regulated (for good reasons) industries like medicine, teaching, and industries reworking professional licenses industries like civil engineering.

You don’t want someone designing a bridge, performing open heart surgery, or flying a plane with 300 people on it who were trained by unverified schools.

> You don’t want someone designing a bridge, performing open heart surgery, or flying a plane with 300 people on it who were trained by unverified schools.

The risk tolerance varies a lot between people.

Sure, but you can logically figure out why many of those professions sought professional licensure and accreditation in the first place.

It’s the same concept as “regulations are written in blood.”

Rather: regulators want to regulate.

Don't a lot of regulated industries have a test you can take like the Bar or PE so it doesn't matter where you get a degree?

It varies. In most states, you need to graduate law school in order to take the bar, but there are some exceptions.

Getting a pilot's license requires a certain number of hours of flight experience, which one gets as a student.

No state issues a medical license without completing an accredited residency program.

The people designing the plane aren't licensed. Engineers working on public infrastructure are licensed (at least one of them to sign off) as well as most buildings. But that is mostly it. Across the vast majority of industries, engineers aren't licensed in the US.

The majority of college students are not studying something that falls into these categories though.

It is completely absurd we have not built an alternative, online liberal arts 4 year degree that basically cost nothing.

There is absolutely no reason this could not be done for less than $1k a year right now.

I suspect a large reason is because the people who benefit from the cartel, basically every professional educator, like things as is. The massive education inflation cost is a feature for the cartel, not a bug.

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