The state and federal governments in the USA spend billions of dollars every year to support universities in the USA. Surprisingly, there are no government standards for the quality of education at universities in the USA. Instead, minimum standards for education in universities are set by private, nonprofit corporations, called accrediting organizations.

My impression is that accreditation in the USA is mostly a bureaucracy, full of buzzwords about quality and integrity of degrees.

Evaluations of a department involve preparing a thick stack of paper about each class (documenting the objectives, content, requirements, and example examinations of every class), as well as including the c.v. of each professor. Of course, what really matters is the knowledge of students who pass each class, but accrediting organizations seem to accept the polite assumptions that a professor would never:

• teach only part of the written course syllabus, to make the class easier for the students.
• give generous partial credit when grading examinations, so that students who are incompetent make a score higher than 70% and pass the class.
• tell the students what will be on the examination, so the students can prepare to take the examination.
• avoid using online tools to detect plagiarization, despite evidence that at least 1/4 of term papers in universities in the USA contain plagiarized material.
• privately reprimand students who plagiarize their term papers, instead of giving them a failing grade in the class and reporting them for investigation and disciplinary action.

I would suggest that accrediting organizations evaluate students who have graduated instead of focusing solely on evaluation of classes in a department or college.

Despite the fact that accrediting standards in the USA are weaker than I would prefer, I have no doubt that degrees from an accredited university have more integrity than degrees from a non accredited university.