Actually Horrible

“Maecenas Presenting the Liberal Arts to Emperor Augustus” 1743 Giambattista Tiepolo

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The astonishing number of education industry trade associations may be the defining characteristic of an industry that is both a business and a culture; primarily a culture.  Of the 11 major economic sectors, most industries have only one or two trade associations advocating on their behalf.   The United States education industry, however, has the better part of one hundred trade associations; as the list at the bottom of this page reveals.

Every branch of a typical school district, college or university organization chart has a trade association competing with other trade associations for membership, conference revenue, sponsor and donor dollars, advertisers and the like.   They conform to a similar business model and they all think they are mighty special.  Many “leadership”; some claim “international”; a few of them claim hegemony over all the others. Is this the strength of the education industry — about 4 percent of US gross national product — or its weakness?

To a degree that may be surprising to many, the non-profit sector is a proxy for the for-profit sector; owed largely by the need for corporate sponsorship by membership organizations.   There are other industries where market actors simultaneously cooperate and compete.   Standards Michigan is a for-profit organization.

There are about 100,000 public schools and about 5000 degree-granting institutions in the United States according to the National Center for Education Statistics (a part of the US Department of Education).   We have been harvesting web sites for education industry trade associations at irregular intervals for about 10 years; largely because of the accumulation of evidence that trade associations are a contributing factor in the parabolic increase in the cost of education.  With this list (which grows weekly, and should be considered a work in progress) we hope to enlighten understanding of the regulatory landscape where trade associations compete for membership revenue and the status as the “leader” and “opinion aggregator”.

Most education industry trade associations depend upon revenue from interest categories that effectively duplicate the interest categories that dominate incumbent stakeholders in the global standards system.  The practical effect of this challenges ANSI balance-of-interest due process requirements.  The weakness of the user-interest is a wicked problem^[2] and not the fault of accredited standards developers.  All accredited standards developers devote significant resources to recruiting user-interest subject matter experts.  The lack of end-user participation resembles the central problem of participatory democracy.  

We suggest that it is unwise for consensus product developers — ANSI accredited, open-source or ad hoc peer-to-peer collaborations — to assume that any one of them can claim authority to speak for an entire industry.  The list below should support this claim.  Some of them have no physical address but retain private, for-profit membership management companies.  The fragmentation of interests that we see in American society as a whole is conveyed into the education sector.   This characteristic presents challenges and opportunities.

While our primary focus lies upon the safety and sustainability of real assets — i.e. the built environment that runs about $500 billion annually in construction, operation and maintenance — there is another accreditation space that is focused on the accreditation of the academic programs:

US Department of Education Accreditation Agencies

We simply acknowledge the presence of these organizations because, as we state in our ABOUT, the serious money in the standards space lies in accreditation.  “Standards are the seed-corn for accreditation”.   With that, we proceed to our curated list of trade associations relevant to our primary business.  In approximate alphabetical order:

Education Community Associations 22 September 2022