Before I begin, I want to thank Heritage Action, and all the Heritage scholars who have made today possible. I think the conservative movement is always at its best when it’s about ideas.

And I think 2014 is beginning an important era for our country, when Americans are going to need conservatives at our best. For four decades, that is what the Heritage Foundation has been. And as we begin the process of developing a new, and long-overdue, conservative reform agenda, events like this are going to prove invaluable to the development of that agenda.

In 1861, Abraham Lincoln told the United States Congress that to him, the “leading object” of government was to:

“…elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

Today, one of the great artificial weights on working families’ shoulders and obstacles blocking their paths of laudable pursuit is the rising cost, narrowed access, and uncertain value of higher education.

Those problems are all symptoms of the deep paradox at the heart of higher education policy today.

And the challenge to policymakers is to overcome that paradox by reconciling two, seemingly contradictory, facts.

On the one hand, as the United States continues to transition from an industrial economy to an information-based economy, higher education is more important to social opportunity and economic mobility than ever before.

And on the other hand, the standard credential of higher education, the Bachelors Degree, is being progressively de-valued by the diminishing quality and exploding costs of undergraduate education.

How is it possible that higher education is becoming more valuable and a bachelor’s degree less, at the same time? Because they aren’t the same thing.

To succeed in the 21^st century global economy, the vast majority of Americans need at least some post-secondary knowledge and skills. But a four-year sojourn at a traditional brick-and-ivy residential institution is no longer the only way to get them.

Part of the problem is simple vocabulary. 

Until very recently, the college campus really was the only game in town. To make higher education cost-effective, you needed a centralized location where students from far away could be near teachers, where scholars from different fields could be near each other, and where all of the above could be near a common library.

Today, technology has made it possible for students to take classes from professors in another state; for academics to conduct research with colleagues across oceans; and for anyone with an iPad to carry a library around in their backpack.

For the first time in history, students don’t have to go to college… to go to college.

Today there are vocational schools and specialized training programs, especially in the growing technology industries. There are apprenticeships in the skilled trades. There are hybrid on-campus/on-the-job models. There are public, private, and for-profit colleges, of varying tiers and emphases. There is the bourgeoning promise of distance learning options, like Massive Open Online Courses.

Unfortunately, this innovative, alternative market is being cordoned-off from the vast majority of students by increasingly outdated federal policy governing higher-education accreditation.

Here’s how it works.

Federal student assistance – primarily Stafford Loans and Pell Grants – are offered through Title IV of the Higher Education Act.

Under that law, students are eligible for Title IV loans and grants only if they attend formally accredited schools. There is a good quality-control argument for this. Except that’s not where the restrictions end.

Also under the law, only degree-issuing academic institutions are allowed to be accredited. And only the U.S. Department of Education can authorize accreditors. Furthermore, as you might remember, Congress effectively killed the private student loan industry in 2009.

Taken together, these restrictive policies artificially narrow Americans’ path into the middle class opportunity and security.

In effect, the federal government today operates a kind of higher-education cartel. Federally approved accreditors operate as a gatekeeper to keep unwanted providers out of the market. This arrangement does not protect students from bad actors so much as it protects incumbent colleges from innovative competitors.

Inevitably, as government has closed, protected, and subsidized this market, it has started to break down.

The price of college has exploded, so it’s now impossible for all but the wealthiest students to pay their own way. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of the B.A. degree has made it difficult to achieve middle-class security without that increasingly expensive and increasingly nebulous credential.

However unintentionally, current policies are creating three classes of students. First, you have affluent kids who attend the best public and private high schools, who are all but certain to graduate college and simply have to decide which one to attend.

Next, you have high school graduates who certainly could go to college, but are reluctant to take on that much debt and might prefer to explore more tailored or affordable education or training.

And then there are people current policy all but locks out of the system:

• high school dropouts;
• students betrayed by the system, who are socially promoted all the way to graduation without being prepared for college-level work;
• and others, like single parents, whose life circumstances make it almost impossible to take enough courses at a time to qualify for federal assistance.

In effect, Washington’s offer to most Americans after high school is: go tens of thousands of dollars into non-dischargeable debt to pursue an over-priced degree there’s no guarantee you’ll receive, or spend the rest of your life locked out of the middle class.

Most progressives think increasing the level of taxpayer assistance will make up for any policy dysfunction. But we’ve tried that, and just like in the housing market, all we’ve done is inflate a bubble. Last summer, outstanding student debt passed $1 trillion, now greater than total outstanding credit card debt.

It seems to me that the answer isn’t more funding for existing Title IV programs.

Instead, the answer is to make more kinds of students and more kinds of education eligible for those programs.

That’s what my bill, the Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act, would do.

It would empower states to create alternative, parallel accreditation systems, to enable students in their state to get Title IV assistance to attend alternative post-secondary education providers.

Participation would be totally voluntary, and would in no way interfere with the current system. State-based accreditation would augment, not replace, the existing policy regime.

College presidents can rest assured that if they like their regional accreditor, they can keep it.

The key difference would be that state-based accreditation would not be limited to traditional, degree-issuing academic institutions.

Title IV-aid would be available to students seeking specialized programs, apprenticeships, professional certifications, competency tests, even individual courses.

Nor would states be limited to authorizing incumbent accrediting agencies. Businesses, labor unions, trade associations, non-profit groups, and any other applicant that met the state’s requirements could be empowered to accredit.

Under state accreditation, America’s higher education market could become as diverse and nimble as the job-creating industries looking to hire. 

Authorized businesses could accredit courses and programs to teach precisely the skills they need.

Imagine, computer courses accredited by Apple or Google. Dow could accredit a chemistry program. Boeing could craft its own aerospace engineering “major.” Or Hilton could accredit a hospitality training program specifically designed to meet current market needs.

Accrediting individual courses would give the student still weighing her options the chance to take a course or two without going thousands of dollars into debt.

An entry-level employee who only needed to take a few classes to qualify for a promotion could find a program specifically tailored to his needs.

Accrediting competency exams would allow students to acquire skills on their own timelines, liberated from the arbitrary semester calendar.

High school graduates unprepared for college or career by their dysfunctional local school boards and teachers unions could get assistance to start catching up in remedial classes or getting professional skills.

Single moms and parents pulling double shifts could finally be eligible for Title IV funds to build their transcripts at a personalized and sustainable pace.

Labor unions and companies who employ skilled workers could accredit innovative apprenticeship and training programs, potentially developing entirely new delivery models.

That’s another exciting feature of this plan – it opens doors for more students and more teachers.

In innovating states, talented faculty uninterested in esoteric, “publish or perish” research required for traditional tenure, could instead focus their energy on classroom excellence.

Groups of professors could strike out on their own, forming new business models, like medical practices. They could offer high-quality higher education for a fraction of the cost of four years at a traditional university.

States could finally start to level the playing field for new innovations like MOOCs, and see where empowered students and teachers can take that technology.

These reforms would begin to turn higher education into the cutting-edge growth industry our information economy needs it to be.

Institutions of civil society could play a crucial role, too. Non-profit groups like the U.S. Historical Society, the Sierra Club, or the Mayo Clinic could accredit programs in their respective fields, or competency-measuring exams for various courses.

Think of the proliferation of opportunities. Faith communities and civic organizations could begin to offer local students accredited college courses, for next to nothing, as part of their missions. Qualified individuals could make teaching higher education their form of tithing or community volunteering.

After all, properly considered, the retired mechanic who lives down the street… and the stay-at-home mom with the masters degree… and the Civil War re-enactor with encyclopedic knowledge of military history are all potential teachers current policy keeps on the sidelines.

Alternative accreditation could start to get them into the game.

After all, how long does the world really have to wait for Heritage University?

Seriously, we already know that people other than tenured academics can teach college-level material. Adjunct professors, teaching assistants, and high school Advanced Placement teachers do it every day.

And we already know credentials other than the B.A. work perfectly well in fields that use them. Accountants take the CPA test. Stock brokers take the Series 7. And skilled tradesmen have their various journeymen exams – just to name a few.

And in the most important growth industry in our economy – high technology – non-academic professional certifications have been flourishing for years. The market is moving in this direction. It’s time for federal policy to catch up.

There are too many valuable opportunities and invaluable people current law excludes. It’s time to decouple Title IV eligibility and enrollment at degree-issuing institutions.

My bill would begin that process: 

• spurring innovation and experimentation;
• creating jobs and opportunities for students, teachers, and everyone in between;
• opening up the higher education market to new ideas;
• driving down costs and lowering barriers to the middle class.

Some reformers might want to go even further – to open up the market with a national system based in Washington, or blow up the existing accreditation system altogether.

But I submit that housing alternative accreditation in the states accomplishes three conservative goals at once.

First, it will protect the new market from the cronyism that always targets centralized power. It’s a lot harder for special interests to get to fifty competing states than to corrupt a single, monolithic bureaucracy.

Second, it will allow competitive federalism to work its magic. Neighboring states will be able to check one another’s imprudence and inaction. And voters will finally begin to have a say in this process, too, as higher education reform and innovation becomes an important issue in gubernatorial and state-legislative campaigns.

And, finally, it will preserve and reward what does work at today’s colleges and universities.

It is wrong to say America’s higher education system is failing. It succeeds every day beyond any reasonable expectation of the people who created it generations ago. Our best colleges remain the best colleges anywhere. That’s why students from around the world come here to study.

But federal higher education policy is failing the two-thirds of Americans who never get a B.A., and the large minority of Americans who never set foot on a college campus.

Those Americans need access to skills that current colleges aren’t teaching… at prices that four-year residential institutions can’t afford… on timelines the academic calendar can’t accommodate.

And the lower a student’s income and more pressing their life circumstances, the greater their need.

In today’s customizable world, students should be able to build their transcripts a la carte – on-campus and online, in classrooms and offices, with traditional semester courses and alternative scenarios like competency testing. And assistance should follow them at every stop along the way.

We don’t need to dump our higher education system – we just need to open it up to more students and teachers. A little competition will be good for everyone, but the goal of reform should be to build up, not tear down.

So instead of eliminating our current accreditation regime, my bill would simply allow 50 new ones to compete with it, and each other – with enough quality control to protect students and taxpayers, and enough flexibility to incentivize experimentation and innovation.

In higher education, as in so many other areas, the greatest threats to equal opportunity – those artificial weights and obstacles Lincoln described – are the unintended consequences of dysfunctional policies. The current system has helped a lot of people, but it has left many others behind.

Reform needs to circle back and make equal opportunity a reality for everyone.

The point of higher education policy should be to enable good teachers to teach, willing students to learn, the economy to grow, and civil society to flourish.

And most of all, it should look out for those students the current system is leaving behind. The American people are ready to meet that challenge, and accreditation reform will start to give them that chance.