Most educators are confident that accreditation is still the primary measure of academic quality. It is further true that the proliferation of accrediting bodies add to institutional costs, and university presidents are questioning the cost/benefit ratio.

Although most agree that institutional accreditation alone will not suffice to ensure quality, accreditation processes often are used as an excuse to limit innovation and experimentation, to protect discipline turf and to avoid interdisciplinary approaches to learning or to collaborative accreditation processes. How can these phenomena be avoided?

Many agree that higher standards and better progress in American higher education over time has been the result of accreditation's peer review process. Others argue that with the reauthorization of the higher education act in 1992 and again in 1997, it may well be time for total system review and some re-engineering of this frustrating, complex, confusing and labor intensive higher education "quality" process.