In Final Stretch of Accreditation Negotiations, Trump Administration Resists Compromise

A year into headline-grabbing attacks against the higher education system, the Trump administration is trying to cement right-wing ideology through a more esoteric route: accreditation. 

Accreditors serve as gatekeepers of the financial lifeblood that keeps most colleges in business—federal student aid, which encompasses federal student loans and Pell Grants. They decide whether colleges merit access to that $120 billion annual funding pool. 

The U.S. Department of Education has put forth a regulatory plan that would weaken consumer protections while prescribing mandates on accreditors and institutions in areas outside the federal government’s authority, like curriculum and faculty hiring. The department is negotiating the plan with those who would be affected by a rule change, like state officials, and current and aspiring accreditors. 

It also opened negotiations with a political appointee telling participants the administration’s vision would “happen with or without you,” a blunt signal that compromise was never its goal.

The Education Department starts its second and final week of these talks Monday, May 18. The following recaps how the Education Department adjusted its plan on key issues, if at all, after the first round of negotiations.

Compliance with state and federal laws, including civil rights statutes

Trump administration officials have broadly attempted to take diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives to slaughter (a campaign that has been met with legal setbacks). Last year, an executive order brought that anti-DEI crusade to accreditation, with the president falsely claiming accreditors had “abused their enormous authority” and foisted diversity programs onto colleges.

That order demanded accreditors dispense with policies that violate federal law, which it decreed to be any DEI-related measure. 

This regulatory plan similarly seeks to push accreditors into becoming the Trump administration’s DEI police. It requires accreditors to verify that colleges they oversee aren’t flouting federal law, including the First Amendment and civil rights laws—and any campus diversity program is a violation, the Education Department has made clear.

Michale McComis, a negotiator and an accreditor CEO, questioned during debate last month whether accrediting bodies had the know-how to certify that colleges were completely in compliance with the law.

McComis questioned how accreditors would know if a college flouted the law—how could they know, for example, if an institution definitively ran afoul of the First Amendment?

“There’s no way for us to make that determination,” he said.

Trump administration officials waved away those concerns. Jeffrey Andrade, a Trump political appointee, said during discussion that it won’t make “accreditors the new Office of Civil Rights for the Department of Education. We’re not trying to make them the new Department of Justice.”

However, the Education Department has largely rejected negotiator attempts to scale back this overly broad mandate. For example, it turned down a proposal by two negotiators that struck references to compliance with First Amendment and civil rights laws, instead suggesting that a single section of the plan cover violations of state and federal law.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration and conservative politicians have also taken issue with accreditation decisions that some believe interfere with states’ laws and authority. For example, after dustups in several red states where the accreditor raised questions about political influence, Florida and North Carolina both passed legislation forcing their public colleges to change accrediting bodies. The regulatory plan would prevent accreditors from acting when a state law is implicated, or on issues of public college governance.

Intellectual diversity and academic freedom 

A complaint among conservatives, which the Trump administration has perpetuated, is that higher education is antithetical to their values. Republicans often deride what they view as a dearth of conservative opinions and faculty among colleges—and have called for academic freedoms and “intellectual diversity” to remedy the perceived imbalance.

The Education Department’s plan drags accreditors into the debate, requiring them to evaluate colleges’ academic freedom protections. 

Negotiators felt this type of review went beyond accreditors’ scope, and suggested language that would pare back what accrediting agencies had to enforce when it came to academic freedom. 

Not only did the department not budge from the provision, but in the newest version of the proposal also added a new definition of academic freedom that heightens concerns. 

Academic freedom “does not include the freedom to introduce, or solicit discussion of, material that is not germane to the subject of the course being taught,” the plan now reads. This nakedly authoritarian language represents the federal government dictating limits on what instructors can teach in their classrooms. The proposal contains no guides for how a college or accreditor would determine what counts as “germane” during classroom discussion—the vagueness is likely by design, enabling regulators to step in only when they are so inclined.

Guardrails to curtail low-quality accreditors and accreditation switching

The federal government has maintained clear restrictions for colleges that want to switch accreditors—for instance, regulations prevent an institution from jumping to a new accrediting body if its current one had recently sanctioned it. The protections try to make sure a college can’t evade punishments by shifting accreditors.

The Trump administration’s plan would bulldoze those guardrails. The Education Department last year already issued guidance that allowed for quick accreditation switching, and the regulatory proposal would weaken the model further, essentially giving colleges automatic approval to switch even if their accreditors had already penalized them.

At the same time, the proposal would speed up the process by which new accreditors become financial aid gatekeepers, a process known as recognition. The Education Department often criticizes what it has deemed a stagnant field—the same roster of accreditors supervising a vast majority of colleges that receive federal aid. 

These twin changes would invite a race to the bottom, in which new, potentially derelict accreditors would flood the system, attracting colleges that seek less scrutiny. 

Existing accreditors would likely dilute their own policies to remain competitive in this field, and colleges would have the greenlight to jump from accrediting agencies seemingly as often as they like.

The Education Department rejected this framing, calling it a “red herring cliche of opponents” arguing that such a phenomenon has not occurred.

But it already did at one point, argued Jennifer Blum, the negotiator representing a federal accreditation advisory board known as NACIQI. 

“I’m not going to name the now deceased accreditor, but at the time they were moving, we, the collective we, didn’t know actually that those institutions were in trouble,” Blum said. “And so I do think we need to keep a close eye on the race to the bottom issue.”

Several negotiators, including representatives of students and student loan borrowers and institutional accrediting agencies, suggested limiting when an institution can switch accreditors. The department turned down those proposals.

The Education Department could have unilaterally overridden accreditor decisions

One of the most concerning parts of the Education Department’s plan would have let it keep federal aid flowing to a college if it determined an accreditor failed to follow its own policies when revoking accreditation.

This provision would have completely circumvented the higher education accountability apparatus as Congress designed it—accreditors are necessary to unlocking federal aid. 

After several negotiators raised concerns about this latitude, the Education Department walked its plan back somewhat. The department’s language now states that it would be able to continue federal financial aid to a college during arbitration, or a judicial review. 

However, this is already standard practice for the Education Department. This new provision would create confusion about when the department will continue to process federal aid. 

As the negotiated rulemaking session enters its final stages, the Education Department has shown little interest in the “negotiated” part of the process. Questions remain unanswered on many of the issues negotiators raised last month—and often the department has declined to meaningfully narrow or reconsider troubling parts of its proposal. It should do so, and preserve accreditation as an independent quality-control process.