Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Two USA Today reporters, Chris Quintana and Shelly Conlon, looked into Reagan National University, a for-profit college recently accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools, and saw an immediate problem: “By all appearances, at present it has no students, no faculty and no classrooms.”

The article goes on to describe how Betsy DeVos restored capacity of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools to grant approval to for-profit schools after the Obama administration shut it down because of it’s lax oversight. It also describes the checkered history of “Reagan National University”, which was formerly called Northern Virginia University before that state’s accrediting board shut it down and the college relocated to South Dakota. Why South Dakota?

In some ways, South Dakota was the ideal place for Reagan. The state has among the laxest rules for colleges in the country. State officials merely ask colleges whether an accrediting group has approved them — they don’t independently hold universities accountable.

It is perversely humorous that a college named for a POTUS who championed deregulation is in existence because another POTUS who operated a flimflam college restored an inept accreditor who approved a college that intentionally sought a location in the state with the most lax regulations… It isn’t funny, though, to any of the students who enrolled in this college and took out loans to attend classes. But in the Social Darwinist world that libertarian deregulators live in caveat emptor is the rule and government should stay out of the way of the marketplace.