A proposed measure from a federal commission would change who decides which universities can award degrees.
The proposal recommends the creation of a national accrediting body to eliminate a system that the commission sees as biased against the public's interests.
Colleges and universities are currently accredited by one of six regional organizations. A number of other organizations accredit individual professional and pre-professional schools, including those of medicine, engineering and business.
But if the proposal were to become a reality, Congress could create a foundation to supplant these accreditors.
Penn officials who deal with accreditation say any changes are unlikely to affect Penn because meeting accreditation standards is rarely a concern for the University.
But the implications for academia at large may be far-reaching. The standards used to judge a university's quality, officials say, could be subject to political whims under this proposal.
Robert Dickeson, a consultant to the commission and the proposal's author, said that the current system of accreditation is complicated, costly and cumbersome.
Because colleges coordinate and pay for accreditation themselves, the system looks out for their interests rather than those of the public, he said.
As a result, the public "is being shortchanged," he said.
The national accrediting body described in the proposal would fix this problem, Dickeson added. The organization would be governed in part by elected officials and would be designed to bring greater transparency to the process.
The proposal has many opponents, however.
Bernard Lentz, Penn's director of institutional research and analysis and a liaison to the University's accreditor, said the formation of one national accrediting body would cause many problems.
Such an organization would create "an ill-fitting, one-size-fits-all" standard for disparate institutions of higher education ranging from two-year community colleges to research universities like Penn, he added.
Furthermore, Lentz said that electoral politics could come to drive education issues.
He cited the recent Pennsylvania state hearings on liberal bias at public universities as an example of a "scary" situation that occurs when politics gets mixed up with higher education.
He added that the proposal is not a major issue of concern for Penn because the University's accreditation is usually a foregone conclusion.
Lentz added he doesn't expect the proposal to pass.
Jean Morse, executive director of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredits Penn, said that the current system is adequate.
She said that building a new system from scratch, creating a new bureaucracy and using taxpayers' money to do this isn't necessary.
What will actually come of the proposal, however, is still unclear.
At a mid-May meeting, the commission -- created by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings last fall -- will consider hundreds of recommendations, according to Dickeson, the government consultant.
