5 Takeaways from the Trump Plan Overhauling College Accreditation

For months, U.S. Department of Education officials have made clear they intend to wholesale rewire the American system of college accreditation—a revolution, as one called their goals.

Accreditors selected by the U.S. Department of Education assess colleges to determine whether they should have access to the $120 billion in federal student financial aid distributed every year.

The Trump administration’s new regulatory proposal for accreditation would wreck the system. The Education Department has framed the draft rule as necessary to slim down the accreditation framework. And indeed it does. The proposal so severely weakens safeguards, for instance, around colleges switching accreditors, that the system ceases to function as a consumer protection altogether. Simple regulatory relief it is not. 

At the same time, the proposal would introduce an astonishing level of government encroachment into higher education. It is so prescriptive that the government would be in essence directing the nation’s colleges on matters as granular as faculty hiring, stretching the education secretary’s legal authority far beyond its limits. It’s a striking posture for an education secretary who has continually called for shutting down the department she’s now seeking to empower. 

The language in this proposal is far from final. The Education Department will negotiate and rework it during sessions April 13 through April 17 and May 18 to May 22. Here, we lay out five parts of the proposal to watch as that process moves forward. These provisions are particularly concerning and must be reconsidered. 

The draft rule would:

1. Allow troubled colleges sanctioned by their accreditor to find a new one. This would likely enable predatory or low-quality institutions to evade scrutiny from regulators. Under the proposal, a college that would want to flip to another accreditor would need to submit documentation, which would include the reason for the change, to the education secretary. The rule, however, would direct the secretary to automatically approve that switch, unless the department uncovered evidence the college was moving accreditors to escape oversight. But the Trump administration has no interest in this type of accountability, having shed much of the department staff that handle those types of reviews. So even if a college was trying to change accreditors to avoid sanctions, the Trump department would very likely not challenge the move. Current regulations forbid colleges from shifting to another accreditor for two years if they’ve been punished, for example, put on probation. The proposal would give rise to a system where colleges could hop to another accreditor if they were scamming students, or not giving them the education they deserve. Taxpayer money would still flow to those colleges, too. 
2. Bring inexperienced or laissez faire accreditors into the federal system. The draft rule cuts down on important steps for accreditors to become “recognized,” the process in which the Education Department approves them as gatekeepers of federal student aid. Under the current setup, an accreditor that wants recognition must do some type of accreditation work for at least two years before gaining recognition. And it must accredit a college before the Education Department will review an application for recognition. Based on the changes, accreditors would need almost no experience to become recognized under the Education Department’s plan. It would entirely scrap the two-year timeline. And it would allow an accreditor to be considered for recognition after doing something as simple as setting up a way for colleges to apply for accreditation, so long as it accredits a college or program before it is recognized. Introducing accreditors with little experience in oversight into the market would dilute it, as colleges would likely flock to the more hands-off entities. This in turn could cause current accreditors to also scale back their oversight expectations to remain competitive, spurring a race to the bottom.
3. Force colleges to follow the Trump administration’s demands on faculty hiring. The Education Department’s summary of the draft rule explicitly states the plan would mandate “intellectual diversity” among college faculty. Conservatives have long complained there are few right-aligned faculty voices in the country. The draft rule would require accreditors to enforce “a range of academic perspectives” among their colleges. This vague language cloaks the intent of the Trump administration to police, through accreditors, how many conservative faculty colleges employ. Accreditors by law are supposed to formulate their standards independently from the Education Department, which is also limited in regulating standards on faculty. This provision knocks down those firewalls. 
4. Further the White House’s anti-DEI crusade. The Education Department has prioritized purging American schools of all programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the draft regulation would only bolster that campaign. It would forbid accreditors from creating standards that would force colleges to violate the law. The document specifically mentions policies related to the gender discrimination law Title IX and those “that provide any preferences on the basis of race.” Several other parts of the rule have similar restrictions. Accreditors would not be able to have policies that require colleges to give preferences based on race, color, national origin, or sex—including in admissions, hiring, or contracting. Again, this is the Education Department dictating how accreditors should write their standards, undermining the independence of accreditors and higher education writ large while seeking to eliminate policies that provide students access and help ensure success. Separately, last month, the Trump administration’s top higher education official demanded that two accreditors strip DEI from their standards.
5. Create an avenue for federal student aid, taxpayer dollars, to reach unaccredited colleges. A draft regulation would give the Education Department latitude to circumvent accreditor decisions entirely. If the department decided that an accreditor had violated its own policies, then officials would be able to ignore when accreditation was removed from a college. The Education Department could continue the spigot of federal student aid dollars flowing to institutions that lost accreditation. This piece of the rule would gut the core function of accreditation as federal aid gatekeeper. Congress set out that accreditor approval must unlock federal aid, and the department is seizing that power through a backdoor regulatory maneuver.