Inside the Upstart College Accrediting Agency Focused on Student Outcomes

By

Matthew Arrojas

Updated on February 18, 2025

Edited by

Alex Pasquariello

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The new Postsecondary Commission aims to prioritize college student outcomes over more traditional accreditation standards.

Credit: Steve Gonzales / Houston Chronicle / Getty Images

• The Postsecondary Commission is an aspiring accrediting agency with a unique set of standards.
• PSC will prioritize student outcomes when analyzing colleges and universities.
• The agency wants to be the first new institutional accreditor recognized in over a decade.
• Consumer advocates, meanwhile, worry that the agency could invite bad actors into the higher education space.

College accreditation isn’t the most riveting topic in higher education, but it’s the primary reason that degrees carry any weight in the workforce.

For decades, institutional accrediting agencies have played a fairly straightforward role: Audit colleges and universities across the country to ensure they have the right systems in place to educate students. That includes ensuring that professors are properly credentialed and institutions are financially stable enough to continue offering degree and credential programs.

But an upstart accreditor is looking to shake up a space that has largely remained unchanged for the past six decades.

The Postsecondary Commission (PSC), established in earnest in 2023, aims to make student outcomes the central pillar of its accreditation process, rather than just looking at a school’s operations.

“If you look at what students want in survey after survey, a huge majority say that … a core thing they need is a clear economic future,” PSC’s founder and president, Stig Leschly, told BestColleges.

PSC plans to address students’ concerns by changing the way economic mobility is measured. It’s now examining wages students earn years after enrolling in an institution to determine whether that college or university earns its accreditation. Leschly hopes accreditation from PSC will be both a seal of approval and a model for other accreditors to use in the future.

“Our aspiration isn’t to be a large accreditor,” he said, “but to be a really, really good one in the interest of the field.”

A New Way of Doing Things

Traditionally, college accreditors are less concerned with outcomes and more concerned with how a college or university operates day to day. For example, here are the four primary criteria the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) lists for accreditation:

• Mission
• Integrity: Ethical and Responsible Conduct
• Teaching and Learning for Student Success
• Sustainability: Institutional Effectiveness, Resources, and Planning

While the third category touches on student outcomes, HLC calls for an institution to demonstrate “continuous improvement” in student outcomes. It later defines continuous improvement as “the state of having an ongoing, systematic aspiration for improving quality.”

An analysis from the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that even among accreditors with minimum performance benchmarks, institutions with poor outcomes are given “considerable leeway.”

PSC, however, makes outcomes its primary focus by measuring economic mobility through two primary metrics:

• Value-added earnings: A measure of a student’s earnings after enrollment versus a similar student who never enrolled in any college or university
• Absolute earnings: Ensuring students earn a wage exceeding 150% of the federal poverty guideline

It’s a first-of-its-kind idea, according to Michael Itzkowitz, president of The HEA Group and a member of PSC’s technical advisory board.

“I think it’s taking a further step than most accrediting agencies have so far,” he told BestColleges.

PSC’s value-added earnings metric applies to all students who enroll, not just those who complete their degree. This requires an immense amount of data, Leschly said.

Because of the data requirements, PSC is only operating in Texas, where its agreement with the state allows PSC to access wage data from residents who did not attend college, he said. PSC uses this to create a baseline comparison to determine whether a student’s wage actually increased as a result of attending college.

This happens at the granular, student-specific level, he added.

PSC’s model is sensitive to differences in types of institutions and student demographics.

For example, Leschly said it understands that a degree from a community college may not lead to the same wage increases as a bachelor’s degree from a four-year university. It understands students from rural counties have different earnings expectations than those from urban areas.

A wide array of stakeholders have helped build PSC over the past two years. Its board of commissioners includes former officials from both the Obama administration — Ted Mitchell and James Runcie — and first Trump administration — Jim Blew.

PSC is still in the process of becoming recognized as a federal accreditor, an exceptionally rare occurrence. According to the Department of Education (ED), just three agencies have earned recognition since the turn of the century; two in 2004 and one in 2015.

An R&D Accreditor

Leschly pitches PSC not as an accreditor with mainstream appeal but as a proof of concept for other accreditation agencies.

“The goal here is [research and development],” he said. “There’s not going to be a stampede [of interested institutions]. We’re trying to become a race-to-the-top accreditor.”

Itzkowitz said most accreditation agencies already have the data to ensure students are meeting an economic baseline but don’t utilize this information.

“I see this as a first step that others can continue to learn from and build upon,” he said.

Texas State Technical College (TSTC) agreed to be the first subject of PSC’s accreditation process. PSC must conduct multiple pilot programs to apply for recognition by ED, and its partnership with TSTC began in January 2024.

Michael Bettersworth, senior vice chancellor and chief marketing officer at TSTC, told BestColleges that PSC’s goals are already aligned with TSTC’s, making this partnership a good fit. He added that PSC’s model would also allow the institution to remain adaptable to workforce trends.

“We want to align our accountability standards more closely to our mission,” Bettersworth said.

TSTC operates through a value-added funding model. Since 2014, Texas has calculated the amount of state funds TSTC receives based on student cohort wages.

Bettersworth said this model has spurred TSTC to continually evolve its program offerings. The college has shuttered 18 programs over the past decade because it found graduates from these programs did not enjoy sufficient earnings after graduation.

TSTC welcomes the strict oversight of PSC to help maintain this standard, he added.

“We are honored to be involved in this effort to improve accountability, and we’re very encouraged that there are more people focusing on this topic,” Bettersworth said. “It’s legitimizing, to some degree, our efforts of the last multiple decades.”

Preston Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and another advisory board member, told BestColleges he hopes to see PSC’s model similarly work for other institutions with “innovative ideas.” One such example, he said, would be the newly formed University of Austin established by conservative-leaning investors.

The University of Austin, Cooper said, is experimenting with new ideas like not requiring faculty to hold a Ph.D. While this wouldn’t fly with traditional accreditors, if the nonprofit institution can prove positive student outcomes, it may pass PSC’s accreditation process.

“These ideas might work. But right now, it’s difficult to put them into practice,” Cooper said.

Buzz terms like “innovation” may appeal to some, but for many student and consumer advocates, they set off alarm bells.

Eddy Conroy, senior policy manager at the think tank New America, is one such skeptic.

“Every time new entrants in higher ed want to be open to innovation and new models, it has often been opening the door for private companies to profit off of the higher education system,” he told BestColleges. “That may or not be an issue here, but it is a concern.”

Leschly said PSC’s rigorous standards will deter potential predatory institutions seeking accreditation. PSC’s model weeds out — not invites — bad actors, he claimed.

Bad actors would instead look to other accreditors with milder standards, he added.

Concerns Over Measuring Student Outcomes

Student and consumer advocates generally agree that institutions and accreditors should account for student outcomes. Many have long pushed for earnings and completion rates to be part of the accreditation process.

But there are educators and experts who question the PSC’s model of evaluating student outcomes and worry a new institutional accreditor can open the door to predatory actors.

The chief concern shared by both New America’s Conroy and Emily Rounds, an education policy advisor at Third Way, is the timeline for evaluating institutions. PSC calculates the cumulative value-added earnings 15 years after students enter a program that lasts more than 36 months, which is most baccalaureate programs, according to its model.

“That is a long time,” Rounds told BestColleges, “especially for a new accrediting agency.”

Conroy also said that 15 years is a long lead time for measuring any earning outcomes and asked: What are the chances a person’s salary a decade after graduation is substantially impacted by the degree they earned?

PSC measures cumulative value-added earnings for short-term programs (those shorter than 18 months) five years after enrollment. Conroy said earnings for short-term programs typically fade quickly, so a five-year timeline may not accurately measure a certificate’s impact.

“It’s one of those things that on the surface looks to be great, but the devil is in the details,” he said.

This concern is doubly true for startup institutions without historical data, Rounds said. If it takes PSC over a decade to determine that a new college isn’t creating value, what does that mean for the students in the interim?

PSC’s standards say the agency will measure value-added earnings yearly and has required interim standards. Leschly said continual monitoring allows the agency to “step in” and provide “immediate intervention” in cases where schools fail metrics like the absolute earnings threshold or have poor completion rates.

Wage gains, however, may take longer to measure, he said.

“Whether it’s a startup institution — or much more common in our model, an existing institution of higher ed — we will immediately be able to gain insight into how their graduates are doing,” he said. “There’s no lag here.”

Leschly added that institutions accredited by PSC must be transparent in the data they share with students. That includes making wage data readily available to the public to help students make informed decisions.

The metric itself isn’t likely to change much moving forward, he said. The majority of the design principals will remain, but there may be room to modify some aspects, such as the mandate that enrollees make at least 150% of the federal poverty guideline within a few years of graduation.

“Those are variations of the same theme,” he said, “and we may learn from institutions to modify marginally that standard.”

That would be a relief to Rounds. She said the 150% threshold is far too low a bar for colleges to clear, as a graduate who lives alone would only need to make $23,475 annually to pass PSC’s threshold in the continental U.S.

Another concern with PSC’s model is how the agency will determine the counterfactual student group to compare college students’ earnings.

Leschly said PSC partners with Mathematica to use state wage data to estimate what non-college graduates are likely to make based on their demographics and where they are from, but advocates want more clarity into how those figures are determined.

“For a best-case version, there needs to be a lot more willingness to adapt and adjust what they are viewing as their hallmark standards,” Conroy said. “So far I’m struggling with how they can deliver on what they’re promising without change there.”

What’s Next?

It’s no small feat to become a federally recognized accreditation agency.

PSC launched its first test accreditation of TSTC in early 2024, but it must prove its model with multiple institutions before it applies for recognition. That application will likely come “in a couple years,” Leschly said.

Overall, it could be another six years before PSC is a recognized accreditor, he said.

This comes at a tumultuous time for accreditation. President Donald Trump has an adversarial relationship with existing accreditors. Will Trump see PSC as a welcome disruptor to a system in need of disruption? Or a cog in a machine that needs breaking?

Cooper of AEI foresees the former, not the latter.

“I don’t want to make any predictions,” he said, “but I am optimistic that potentially a more open mindset may be coming soon.”