What Accreditation Really Says About Your School
What you wear says something about you. So does who you associate with. When I was headmaster of a classical preparatory school, I noticed some students wearing Abercrombie & Fitch outside of school hours. I challenged their choice. A&F, I told them, doesn’t just sell clothes—it sells a worldview.
Back then, A&F was known for its provocative advertising: half-naked models, rebellious slogans like “Sometimes it’s good to be bad,” and a glossy celebration of youthful hedonism. Their product wasn’t clothing—it was belonging. Wearing the brand signaled that you were part of the cool, good-looking elite. Style, not substance, was the point. I asked my students, “What would you think if your headmaster wore a Playboy sweatshirt around town?”
A brand says something. So does accreditation.
Accreditation as a Symbolic Marker
Education is an invisible service. You can’t “see” learning happen, so people look for visible proxies: beautiful campuses, faculty degrees—and accreditation. Accreditation is supposed to guarantee quality and integrity. In theory, it protects students from fraud and diploma mills by ensuring schools:
- Provide legitimate instruction
- Operate transparently
- Align with academic standards
But in practice, most accreditation in American education functions more like a designer label. It signals conformity to the dominant educational philosophy—what we might call Brand Progressive.
Progressive Education
Accredited schools overwhelmingly adhere to a progressive pedagogy. Despite America spending more per student than any other nation, our students lag internationally. Why? The reasons are complex—broken families, disengaged teachers, discipline breakdowns—but one foundational cause is philosophical: we’ve built a school system on a flawed understanding of human nature.
Progressive education, rooted in the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, assumes that children are naturally good and learn best when they explore freely. In this model, the teacher is a facilitator, not a guide. Truth is personal, not objective. Learning is not about mastering the best of what has been thought and said—it’s about expressing yourself. This flips education on its head. Instead of students submitting to truth, they sit above it, crafting their own meaning. As E.D. Hirsch, Jr. of the University of Virginia put it, “The progressive way of running a school is essentially the opposite of what ‘effective schools’ research has taught us.” C.S. Lewis, and centuries of Western Christian tradition, understood education differently. Education is a moral and intellectual formation. It is about cultivating virtue and aligning oneself to reality—not escaping into preference and self-expression.
If a school is accredited, it likely means it adheres to progressive assumptions. Accreditation functions as a badge of ideological conformity, not just academic quality. It tells you the school is accepted by—and complicit with—a system that is failing our children. It’s like buying Abercrombie & Fitch: you’re not just purchasing fabric; you’re buying into a way of seeing the world. In this case, a vision that downplays truth, undercuts discipline and replaces formation with freedom.
The Consumerist Trap
Accreditation also reinforces a consumerist model of education. It makes credit transfer easier, encouraging the idea that education is a product to be bought, rather than a journey to be undertaken. But learning isn’t transactional. You can’t buy wisdom any more than you can buy fitness. It must be earned—embodied through effort, discipline, and desire. This is why even mandatory education fails when students are disengaged. Teachers can light the lantern, but the student must walk into the dark.
In the late 19th century, American colleges shifted their rationale and structure from teaching to research. This shift required the structure of the college to move from generalists’ educators to research specialists and consequently raised the cost of education. This model of education is referred to as the Humboldtian model and was first introduced in the United States at the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University. However, today schools that want to reduce costs and prioritize teaching are penalized by an accreditation system that mandates a Humboldtian model in college structure. Accreditation does not serve reduced costs.
Why Some Great Schools Aren’t Accredited
There are schools that are committed to being counter-cultural: schools wanting to reduce costs, prioritize teaching, avoid progressivism, and undermine a consumerist attitude. These schools are often found in the micro-college movement. These are small colleges—roughly the size of a college preparatory school—typically offering one humanities-oriented degree often with a market skill apprenticeship in a cost-effective manner around a traditional Christian worldview. These are worthy alternatives to the typical college and university.
Many modern industries are beginning to recognize that traditional four-year degree programs may not even be the most effective way to prepare students for success in the marketplace. Many parents and students are questioning the assumed value proposition of a typical college degree. Under these conditions, it is illogical for a college to handicap themselves with an accreditation process that maintains a failed status quo. Why align themselves to a failed progressive brand in an expensive Humboldtian model? People are looking for an alternative, for those who are not afraid to be different, who are willing to buck the system for a return to classical biblical education that is transformative because it is aligned to reality—to the truth about the human person and to the truth of God’s creation. Some micro-colleges are looking at ways around accreditation.
There is a small movement now of micro-colleges that are bypassing the liabilities of traditional colleges. These are schools that prioritize teaching, life formation, and launching their students for kingdom service. Schools like North Carolina’s Excel College and California’s Saint Andrew’s College intentionally choose not to be accredited. Not because they lack rigor, but because they refuse to conform to a system built on flawed foundations. They prioritize integrity over approval, life transformation over information transfer. These are colleges whose time has come.
These schools are small by design, focused by conviction, and transformational by mission. They train students not just to succeed, but to serve. They launch lives, not just confer degrees. They teach market-based skills as well as the liberal arts. Their measure isn’t prestige—it’s fruit. Look at their graduates and you’ll see the evidence. They are countercultural institutions, standing prophetically against the mainstream for the sake of the next generation. Their allegiance is not to brand progressive, but to biblical truth and created reality. That’s something no accreditation agency can certify—but it’s what truly matters.
This essay was also published at American Reformer. For more from John Seel and classical Christian education, visit St. Andrew’s Church, Academy & College.
Image Credit: Unsplash.
