3 Key Changes in Trump’s New Accreditation Rule

The Trump administration’s sweeping plan to reshape how accreditors oversee colleges and universities was released for public comment last week, prompting a flurry of consternation about the future of the accreditation system.

Many left-leaning policy experts and accreditation executives fear that the proposal will permanently politicize the long-standing evaluation mechanism designed to create uniform standards for American colleges and universities, regardless of which party is in office. Meanwhile, proponents say it will clarify and reinforce existing statutes, lessen bureaucracy and raise the bar for higher ed quality assurance.

Under the proposal, the administration could require accreditors to enforce First Amendment and civil rights law and set standards related to hiring and intellectual diversity, among other changes. It will also make it easier to recognize new accreditors. Policy experts fear presidents of either party could use these changes as a partisan lever to drive their priorities.

Under federal law, colleges must be accredited by a government-recognized agency in order to access billions of dollars in federal student aid, making accreditation a powerful weapon for politicians to yield. Before Trump took office, accreditation agencies faced bipartisan criticism for how they held institutions accountable.

Trump officials have also repeatedly lambasted the current accreditation system. In the proposal, they accused accreditors of neglecting “their positions of public trust” in part by “improperly shifting their focus away from student achievement to compelling institutions to adopt illegal and discriminatory ideology and practices.”

The deadline to submit public comments is Sept. 21, and if the administration finalizes the rule by Nov. 1, the changes will take effect next July. An advisory committee signed off on the changes in May following two rounds of negotiations.

Several of the changes, including new standards that require accreditors to ensure colleges explain every time they deny a credit transfer and to evaluate the efficiency of all college spending, would also put a greater administrative burden on accreditors and institutions, experts say. But the Trump administration says it’s actually trying to lessen bureaucracy and rein in the power of seven prominent accrediting agencies that it says serve 3,000 of the nation’s institutions.

Here are three other proposed changes critics are worried about.

1. It Could Open Up the Market to New Accreditors

For years, groups seeking government recognition have argued that the process to obtain a seal of approval was riddled with red tape, fueling a monopolized system and making it virtually impossible for new competitors to enter the market. In fact, the department says just four agencies with the power to make institutions eligible for federal student aid have been approved since 1999.

The department hopes to change those numbers with its latest proposal, in part by shortening the timeline to review a new accreditor’s petition for recognition. For example, they won’t have to spend two years granting or denying accreditation or pre-accreditation to institutions before seeking federal recognition.

While traditionalists stress that the regulations for federal recognition are in place to maintain a high bar for accreditors, Trump officials argue that the current system stifles innovation, competition and diverse ideology among accreditors. Their approach, they say, will instead raise expectations for the agencies overseeing colleges.

“In a more dynamic market, accrediting agencies would be incentivized to differentiate themselves based on quality responsiveness and alignment with student outcomes and workforce needs,” Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent told the advisory committee that reviewed the department’s proposal. “Instead, when institutions have limited ability to choose amongst accreditors or face high switching costs, the pressure to compete and improve is reduced.”

The department is also helping new accreditors gain traction through grant funding. In January, at least two new accreditors seeking government recognition each received $1 million to fund their launch.

The Trump administration hopes these regulatory changes will encourage new accreditors—focused on “defending the American tradition,” protecting free speech, eliminating DEI, promoting low-cost or accelerated degrees and ensuring job placement after graduation—to join the market. That said, the administration also acknowledges in its proposal that ED “lacks sufficient data to estimate how these proposed changes will affect the accreditation marketplace.” The prediction that the changes will increase the number of institutional accrediting agencies is just that.

2. Critics Say the Proposal Amounts to Executive Overreach

Some of the changes Trump is hopeful new accreditors will catalyze—like driving down college costs and setting more detailed standards for student earnings and job placement rates after graduation—have long had bipartisan support. But many institutional lobbying groups and left-leaning policy experts say the problem is how the Trump administration is trying to compel existing accreditors to get on board.

Under federal law, an accreditor must set “clear expectations” of how it will assess an institution’s “success with respect to student achievement in relation to the institution’s mission” and that “may include” job-placement rates. But that expectation can vary from institution to institution. The department’s new regulatory language is more prescriptive and universal, saying it must “establish requirements” and set “minimum expectations” that are the same across all member institutions when it comes to student achievement.

The department does not, however, say what those requirements or expectations must be. All it says is that they must assess program retention rates, completion rates, grade point levels, postgraduation outcomes, state licensing results or standardized testing results. The aim is to “eliminate subjectivity and increase the clarity” of the current regulations, officials explain in the proposal.

Similar, more prescriptive forms of existing standards are proposed to explain how an accreditor must evaluate hiring practices and intellectual diversity. For example, the department’s proposal says “when applying its standards on faculty,” accreditors must ensure there is “a sufficient number of appropriately qualified faculty” at each institution and that they maintain academic freedom and First Amendment protections that are “clearly articulated and applied consistently to faculty regardless of appointment classification, race or other immutable characteristics, viewpoint, or ideology.”

Accreditation experts say it remains unclear if it is the accreditor that must do a case-by-case, line-by-line evaluation of a college’s fulfillment of these standards or if a college can conduct its own evaluation and the accreditor must only verify it is being done.

(The department does make certain exemptions for evaluating faculty at religious institutions.)

And though the regulations don’t explicitly define what it means to “maintain academic freedom,” it does recommend a definition that spells out faculty members’ freedom to conduct research without “undue interference,” but it also doesn’t explicitly protect faculty’s ability to teach or share their views on material “not germane to the subject of the course being taught.” The department’s recommendation also makes clear that academic freedom doesn’t prohibit policies designed to promote intellectual diversity.

To hedge the recommended definition, ED says that it is “not requiring” accreditors to apply it. But the proposed rule also says that any accreditor that does apply the recommended definition would “meet the requirements” of Trump’s executive order on accreditation.

So though the suggestion may be nonbinding in theory, it effectively strong-arms accreditors and institutions to comply or risk penalty, Mike Gavin, president and CEO of the Alliance for Higher Education, explained in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

“Defining academic freedom is a role the government should not take, and this section is a tactic to chill inquiry while claiming the administration advocates for intellectual diversity,” Gavin said.

3. It Could Overhaul Traditional Peer Review

Another section of the proposed regulation would require many accreditors to rethink major parts of their business model.

For generations, accreditation has operated as a system of peer review. A group of advisers make up a council, board, commission or combination of the three. In the case of an institutional accreditor, many of those advisers are faculty members or administrators from the various institutions the accreditor oversees; in the case of a programmatic accreditor, they are often members of the affiliated academic association, licensing organization or trade group. Current law also requires one out of every seven advisory body members to have no affiliation with the institutions or affiliated associations.

Collectively, the members of those bodies approve substantive changes at each institution, make the final decisions on whether a program is eligible for federal student aid and set the standards each program is evaluated on.

But under the proposed regulations, advisers may no longer vote on any standards that “affect any institution or program that of which such a member is an officer, director, or employee.” So though programmatic and institutional accreditors will be able to continue using peer review to evaluate which institutions are meeting their standards, they cannot allow faculty members, administrators and members of trade groups to set the standards they are being evaluated on.

The new regulations also say that an accreditor cannot have any partnership with “a related, associated, or affiliated trade association.” That means it can’t receive budgetary advising or support from such a group, it can’t share office space with such a group and it can’t have any shared personnel. This would predominantly affect programmatic accreditors, not institutional ones.

The department says in its proposal that both of these changes are designed to “ensure there is no undue influence over the decision-making body.” But opponents see it as an intrusion on the decades-old peer-review model.