A Fight for Control

Jonathan Fansmith

Senior vice president, government relations and national engagement, American Council on Education

→ The stakes: The accreditation system is a critical component of what makes American higher education so effective—and, however clichéd, the envy of the world for its institutional diversity and capacity. Designed to operate independently from direct government control, accreditation focuses not only on maintaining quality but on continuously improving how institutions serve students. While the federal government has broad authority to intervene with individual institutions, in the past, it rarely has. Accreditors, by contrast, regularly step in, putting institutions on notice and safeguarding academic freedom and educational standards.

→ The political terrain: President Trump’s framing of accreditation as a political “secret weapon” signaled an unprecedented effort to transform a system long designed to operate apart from partisan control. Executive actions have targeted accreditors that reference diversity in their standards and have sought to redirect oversight almost entirely toward narrow student-outcome metrics such as completion, repayment, earnings, and licensure pass rates. These changes mark a sharp break from accreditation’s historic independence and represent a new effort to use quality assurance as an instrument of federal political power.

→ Assessment of changes: A serious discussion about student outcomes, especially at a time when public confidence in higher education is very much in question, is welcome—and accreditors have long considered such outcomes in their evaluations. I am concerned, however, that the administration’s approach is not a sincere effort to strengthen quality assurance. Turning accreditors into political actors risks selective, punitive decision-making that ultimately harms students. Even many conservatives do not want a system in which accreditors become agents of federal political enforcement. They were outraged when they believed prior administrations pressured accreditors to challenge religious institutions’ policies.

→ Recommendations: There is a role for the federal government in setting clear guidelines that every accreditor should follow—though Congress would need to sign off. There are also opportunities to simplify and streamline reviews, which can take years and cost millions. Institutions that meet benchmarks for financial stability could undergo expedited reviews focused on areas likely to have changed. At the same time, there must be clear firewalls to prevent federal interference in hiring, curriculum, admissions, and enrollment decisions.

→ The path forward: 2025 was a rough year. Higher education faced attacks on what we teach, who we teach, the value of our work, and the importance of our research. But being forced to explain accreditation and make the case for higher education has had an unexpected benefit. Different public opinion polls show that when people hear about what higher education does, they value it. That creates a path forward: Higher education leaders should do more to explain the importance of accreditation.

Selena Grace

President, Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities

→ The stakes: Accreditation provides a public demonstration of quality and institutional integrity. Independent oversight that honors each institution’s mission is critical, especially across a diverse portfolio of institutions serving very different students and communities. There is no political partisanship in our work. Standards must be flexible enough to honor diverse state laws and institutional missions, because being overly prescriptive can be detrimental, particularly for rural institutions and tribal colleges facing recruitment and retention challenges. When institutions lack credible quality assurance, students lose protections that ensure their education is rigorous, their credentials have value, and their institutions can support their success. What’s at stake is not an agenda but the viability, integrity, and public trust of higher education itself.

→ The political terrain: Politicians have decided that to drive change, they must engage with education in a partisan way. That has led to the infiltration of K–12 school boards, community college boards, and now accreditation, with explicit political agendas. What’s unprecedented is the expectation that accreditors and institutions should rapidly shift their standards and priorities to match changing political philosophies. Accreditation has historically operated outside such changes.

→ Assessment of changes: Competition from new accreditors is healthy. Accreditors have sometimes been complacent, and we do need to think differently. We should push further on learning outcomes, requiring clearer, comparable evidence of what students actually learn. That empowers students to make better decisions and improves credit portability across institutions. Too many students have attended college but have no degree. New accreditors are not necessarily a problem, but unequal standards are. When the government gives new accreditors flexibility around oversight or substantive change that long-standing accreditors do not receive, it undermines consistency and confidence in the system.

→ Recommendations: I’d like to see greater flexibility from the US Department of Education paired with more timely attention to mergers and acquisitions. Institutions facing closure or consolidation are often dealing with time-sensitive realities, yet approvals can take years, increasing risk and cost. Reform should focus on clarifying goals, reducing micromanagement, and giving accreditors greater discretion while maintaining quality and integrity. Accreditors also need flexibility to adapt to new forms of learning, including microcredentials, AI-assisted education, and accelerated degrees.

→ The path forward: Institutions and the public need clearer conversations about what accreditation is, what accreditors expect, and how we honor each institution’s mission. The standard should be assessing how well institutions support students and meet that mission, not imposing ideology. The original six accreditors have been meeting frequently to clarify false narratives and to communicate in a way that is informative rather than defensive. Despite the challenges, this moment offers an opportunity to reinvent accreditation, better support institutions, and strengthen student success nationwide.

Jacob Howland

Former provost, senior vice president for academic affairs, and dean of intellectual foundations, University of Austin

→ The stakes: Accreditation exists to ensure that the education being advertised is actually what students and families are paying for. That is its core purpose. At a moment when universities are in crisis, efforts to reform accreditation carry real stakes. Some of the Trump administration’s proposed changes could be constructive and long overdue, particularly if they refocus accreditors on mission, outcomes, and accountability. Accreditors can help address institutional failures and restore trust but only if reforms strengthen quality assurance rather than weaken it.

→ The political terrain: Accreditation has drifted from its core purpose. Accreditors exist to assess whether institutions are meeting their stated missions, not to impose curricular mandates independent of those aims. Yet today’s system reflects and exacerbates a broader imbalance in higher education, where left-leaning viewpoints dominate many disciplines. At one of my former institutions, the University of Tulsa, accreditors pressed us to add courses in gender, sexuality, and cultural diversity without clear justification beyond the accreditor’s embedded diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities. Accreditation should instead safeguard open inquiry, civil discourse, and balanced curricula—helping steer institutions back toward intellectual neutrality and genuine diversity of thought.

→ Assessment of changes: The Trump administration’s efforts may be the external prodding that pushes universities—and accreditors as well—back onto the right track. That pressure has already prompted institutions and accreditors to revisit policies in ways that are useful and clarifying. Different rhetoric from the administration would be good, though, because these issues are not, at their core, fundamentally political. They are about mission, quality, and how institutions govern themselves.

→ Recommendations: We must restore a neutral stance in accreditation. Accreditors are fully within their rights to ask whether institutions are delivering what they promise in their missions but not to require curricular elements irrelevant to those aims. Hiring and curricula should favor breadth, balanced reading lists, and engagement with multiple perspectives rather than narrowly defined political frameworks. We need to both reform the approach of existing accreditors and allow new entrants; it’s not either or. The sector also needs serious, structured conversations—perhaps convening presidents and faculty in a nationwide conference—to clarify higher education’s purpose, affirm academic freedom, and explore ways to make open debate core expectations of campus life.

→ The path forward: At the broadest level, this is about the fate of the American university and of higher education itself. Accreditation matters, but it also has limits. The path ahead requires recognizing both its value and its constraints, while focusing on what is genuinely valuable and interesting in higher education and how to sustain the sector in a changing and contentious moment.

Robert Cassanello

President, United Faculty of Florida, and associate professor, Central University of Florida

→ The stakes: Accreditation relies on shared standards that protect students and families by filtering out predatory, profit-driven institutions. What is at stake is more than six decades of best practices developed in response to a clear need for quality assurance. The Trump administration’s proposals would allow states to create their own accreditors, hiring, paying, and appointing their own overseers. That approach undermines independence, erasing a crucial check that has historically stopped political interference and protected students.

→ The political terrain: The push to politicize accreditation is coming from multiple directions, with the Heritage Foundation, a powerful right-wing policy think tank, playing a central role. Its Project 2025 explicitly calls for an alternative accreditation system, framing independent accreditors as “higher education cartels,” language echoed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Historically, independent accreditors served as a crucial check on state interference, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when they helped prevent political pressure against racial integration by threatening the loss of federal aid. That public-good function is now under sustained attack. Florida illustrates the danger: DeSantis has argued that accreditors like SACSCOC exert “undue influence,” even as their investigations have been designed to protect institutions from precisely that kind of political intervention. Undoing those checks would leave higher education more vulnerable to state control.

→ Assessment of changes: The effects of the Trump administration’s changes to accreditation remain unclear, in part because the process has been opaque and many terms are poorly defined. New standards have been released and revised, but they are vague and offer little guidance about how the administration will apply them. Florida provides an early indication of the risks of this approach. State leaders have openly embraced a politicized model, proposing criteria such as “viewpoint diversity” without defining what that means. In practice, it appears to privilege conservative speech rather than protect genuine pluralism. Other proposed standards, such as “value added,” are similarly undefined. The greatest consequence of replacing independent accreditors with state-run systems would be removing a crucial external check on government influence, leaving colleges and universities with fewer protections against political pressure and far less recourse for faculty, students, and whistleblowers to challenge interference in academic freedom or governance.

→ The path forward: Faculty leaders need to resist and to speak out loudly and often. Faculty senates can pass resolutions rejecting state commissions as unnecessary and urging institutions not to use them for future accreditation. Faculty can write op-eds, organize colleagues, and engage the public by talking with students and parents about what is at stake. 

Javier Cevallos

President, American Academic Leadership Institute

→ The stakes: One of the great strengths of the US higher education system is its diversity. That breadth makes the system unique and the envy of the world. Accreditation serves as quality assurance, ensuring that every program is reviewed by someone external to the campus and meets appropriate standards. It protects students, institutions, and the system itself. Accreditation matters because it safeguards both institutional independence and program quality, allowing different kinds of institutions to flourish and better serve students.

→ The political terrain: The Trump administration’s approach breaks with long-standing norms by treating accreditation primarily as an auditing exercise rather than quality assurance. Florida helped set the trend by requiring public institutions to change accreditors after a fixed number of years, a practice borrowed from the business world, where boards regularly rotate auditors. But accreditation is not auditing. While it includes audits of finances, enrollments, and programs, its core function is to assess educational quality. Confusing those roles has fueled calls for new accreditation systems and frequent turnover of accreditors. That logic fails to recognize the diversity of higher education and its many aims—intellectual, civic, and cultural—that cannot be easily quantified. Reducing the accreditation process to a checklist undermines its fundamental purpose.

→ Assessment of changes: The Trump administration’s changes risk reducing broad quality assurance to a narrow audit. Accreditation looks at student success, program quality, learning inside and outside the classroom, and the full educational experience—much of which cannot be captured by numbers alone. For example, measuring institutions mainly by graduates’ salaries misses examining other aspects of graduates’ success as individuals and how education affects their quality of life. Those intangibles matter. A politicized system risks placing government mandates on curriculum and teaching. Requiring external review of syllabi and inviting outside scrutiny into course content chills academic freedom, limits what can be taught, and ultimately diminishes the quality of education students receive.

→ The path forward: National and regional accreditors are likely to become more important as the US Department of Education shrinks. If the department is ultimately eliminated, someone will still have to ensure that institutions and accreditors are acting in students’ best interests. In that landscape, organizations like the Council for Higher Education Accreditation could play a larger role by serving as impartial bodies that accredit and support the accreditors. Accreditation is not static; standards evolve as programs, credentials, and technologies change. Anxiety about political interference is understandable, but higher education has survived many such moments. Accreditation will not disappear—it will adapt. The system remains strong, remarkably diverse, and resilient. Despite real challenges, students continue to succeed. That is my greatest source of hope.

Maria Toyoda

President and CEO, Western Association of Schools and Colleges, Senior College and University Commission

→ The stakes: Past failures show what happens when accreditors do not closely monitor institutions: Colleges collapse, students are left without records, credits do not transfer, and measures that ensure students can complete degrees when institutions close go missing. Federal consumer protections, such as borrower-defense provisions, arrive only after harm is done and cannot restore lost time or effort. The administration is, in some respects, prioritizing deregulation and speed over integrity and accountability, putting students at risk and undermining the system.

→ The political terrain: Various stakeholders, including new and existing accreditors, will negotiate rulemaking this spring to determine the extent to which accreditors will play a bigger enforcement role for federal policies than they have in the past. Accreditation operates through due process and evidence; without clear and objective findings of misconduct or operational failure, accreditation cannot simply be revoked. Attempts to use it as a blunt political tool misunderstand how the system works and risk undermining it. At the same time, heightened scrutiny of diversity programs and campus speech has pushed some institutions to make preemptive decisions that may ultimately harm students without interventions from accreditors.

→ Assessment of changes: Executive orders have called on accreditors to ensure “intellectual diversity,” raising difficult questions about definition and enforcement. How can accreditors measure and monitor this? How can we do that across vastly different institutions where intellectual diversity may mean very different things? Despite the noise, there is little clarity about what the administration expects accreditors to do. However, the changes have pushed accountability and outcomes to the forefront in a useful way. Greater transparency around debt, earnings, and program-level outcomes is a positive development. But when accreditation appears politically driven, public trust in the process erodes and students and families ultimately bear the cost.

→ Recommendations: Accreditors need better access to data across institutions and states, allowing outcomes to be demonstrated more transparently and effectively. Educational outcomes should be understood in more than purely economic terms—currently the focus is too often on salaries. Technology can make it easier to gather and analyze information. But the real work is human work. The hardest part is reaching agreement on common definitions—what counts as success, what outcomes matter, and how they should be measured. Machines can process data, but people must decide what the data means.

→ The path forward: There is little anyone can do to change the administration’s mindset about accreditation. A more productive approach lies in strengthening the relationships accreditors have with institutions, which are generally positive and grounded in trust. Accreditors who work with integrity share a common commitment to putting students first. Ultimately, that commitment matters more than political narratives and will continue to guide our work as accreditors, even in a challenging and uncertain environment. 

Illustrations by Edmon de Haro