For most of the past decade, the lobbying juggernaut of the career-college sector and its political patrons have fought a battle on Capitol Hill to federalize institutional decisions about transfers of credits. They have accused traditional colleges of refusing to award academic credit for what they claim is their institutions' equivalent course work. Career-college advocates of the federal mandate have argued that political intervention is urgently needed to help students. But, as happens too often in Washington, the tail wags the dog: Transfers from for-profit to nonprofit institutions constitute only 4 percent of all first-time transfers, according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office study. If political judgment about academic credits--the basic building blocks of academic degrees--is deemed in any way appropriate, it would inexorably lead to broad politicization of academic judgments in general. Issues that might be hotly contested in popular culture--like whether "intelligent design" has a place in a modern biology curriculum--would be immediately up for a vote in Congress. As imperfect as the faculty's judgment may occasionally be about academic policy, that it is the group one should look to on such matters.