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Accreditors keep hundreds of schools with low graduation rates or high loan defaults alive. Most colleges can’t keep their doors open without an accreditor’s seal of approval, which is needed to get students access to federal loans and grants. But accreditors hardly ever kick out the worst-performing colleges and lack uniform standards for assessing graduation rates and loan defaults.

Members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity discussed their latest set of proposals to overhaul the accreditation process and the way the committee assesses the accreditors. Soon after, the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions released a somewhat similar set of proposals in a white paper written by committee staff members.

Academic fraud has consequences for students and society in general. According to one professor, the subject of corruption has been a big debate for many years in Cuba, but that forms of corruption evolve as the means of change.

As part of the National Accreditation Commission (CNA) case, three universities are accused of bribery. They have allegedly paid CL$25,000,000 to the former director of the aforesaid Commission in order to obtain the very sought-after accreditation.

The issue of quality assurance in the tertiary education system has become a public concern as a consequence of the scandal in which the president of the National Accreditation Commission and at least two chancellors of private universities were arrested and accused of money laundering, bribery and accepting kickbacks.

The former president of Chile's National Accreditation Commission (NCA) and two former university rectors have been jailed on charges of bribery and money laundering. They will spend at least six months in prison, which is how long the Public Prosecution Office has said it will take to investigate the charges.