Colleges and accrediting agencies dodged a bullet this summer as Congress, enacting legislation to renew the Higher Education Act, shielded higher education from the U. S. Education Department " s efforts to step up federal regulation of how accreditors and colleges ensure that students are learning. The legislation barred the Education Department from issuing regulations to affect accreditors" standards on student learning outcome. But Lamar Alexander warned in June, college leaders shouldn" t let themselves think that the shooting has stopped. Congress will next renew the Higher Education Act in five years, David Geary told a group of college and accrediting officials this summer, and in "the absence of good answers " between now and then about how higher education can prove its effectiveness, increased federal intervention is sure to follow. To try to start that conversation quickly, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation on Monday held the first of what will be a series of national forums about the future of higher education self-regulation. Numerous critics from outside higher education have expressed doubt that the higher education industry, through the peer-review-based system of accreditation, can effectively regulate its own quality and effectiveness, given that accrediting agencies are governed by the institutions being scrutinized. But Monday" s discussion was designed, CHEA officials said, not to beat that drum but to brainstorm about what higher education officials must do to ensure that self-regulation survives. " We need to marshal ammunition we could use to defend the system of self-regulation," said A. Lee Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and former college president and U. S. assistant secretary for postsecondary education. " I feel like I am singing to the choir in this room," Molly C. Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said at the start of remarks in which she, like virtually all the speakers, made clear a preference to limit further federal incursion into higher education quality control.