The Higher Education Accreditation Wars Are Heating Up

College accreditation is one of the least understood and most important issues in higher education. It is the process by which private, nonprofit organizations recognized by the federal government decide whether a college meets basic standards of academic quality, financial stability, and institutional performance. The findings of this process have enormous consequences for the institution, including its ability to access federal student grants and loans. Now that the U.S. Department of Education has completed the opening round of public negotiations over a major accreditation overhaul, accreditation will likely garner more public attention.  

The Department’s Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization, or AIM, process is not a modest tune-up of the rules governing the nation’s dozens of regional and national accreditors, such as the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and the Distance Education Accrediting Commission for online schools. The proposed rules, being hammered out by federal officials and the non-federal representatives of key stakeholder groups, are a broad effort to remake accreditation, including more competition among accreditors, fewer barriers for new accreditors, stronger accountability for student outcomes, and a system that’s responsive to taxpayers. One round of negotiations finished in April, and another is scheduled for May. 

Those goals are consistent with the Education Department’s February announcement that it was reducing barriers for new accreditors, noting that few new accreditors have received federal recognition in recent decades. The case for reform is not hard to understand. The current system has long been criticized for being insular, process-heavy, and weakly tied to students’ success following graduation.  

In the Education Department’s presentation and in the discussion that followed at its week-long opening round of public negotiations held in Washington, D.C., Department officials and the key stakeholder groups repeatedly noted that long-standing regional accreditors still dominate oversight of institutions, enrollment, and federal student-aid dollars. Voluntary switching by institutions from one accreditor to another is rare. And student outcomes vary widely across post-secondary institutions within the same accrediting agencies.  

That’s not a trivial indictment. It suggests that accreditation is less an important validation of quality than a cozy arrangement among incumbents. Some of the Education Department’s ideas follow naturally from that diagnosis. These ideas include making it easier for institutions seeking to become accreditors to gain recognition, thus easing the path for colleges to switch accreditors. Another idea: using risk-based institutional reviews to focus federal scrutiny on the institutions that oversee the most student-aid dollars, draw the most complaints, or are growing quickly. 

Critics of the existing system charge that accreditation is better at supervising inputs and procedures than at determining whether students are getting real educational value.  

But that’s only half of the story. The Education Department, under Secretary Linda McMahon, is not only seeking more open and competitive accreditation. It’s also trying to change what accreditors examine, how they judge institutions, and how federal pressure should be applied.  

The proposed rules go well beyond opening the accreditation market to more competition. It has become a fight over control. They reach into student achievement, faculty evaluation, transfer of credit, how students finish when a college or program closes, civil rights compliance, academic freedom, and what it calls “viewpoint neutrality” and “intellectual diversity” which seems like euphemisms for the Donald Trump’s administration’s concerns with schools that it views as “woke” and policies it opposes such as diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

The overhaul could reshape accreditation in specialized fields such as engineering, health care, and veterinary medicine, where standards affect curriculum, staffing, equipment, and even access to licensure.  

That’s why this moment seems less like reform than war. Reformers see a needed disruption of a closed and complacent system. Colleges, accreditors, and many higher-education lawyers see something else.  

They see the federal government using accreditation to govern colleges more directly, and perhaps more ideologically, than the law allows. Some argue the rules exceed the Education Department’s statutory authority and are vulnerable to legal challenge. “This is a kettle of contradictions,” John R. Przypyszny, a lawyer who specializes in accreditation, wrote in an email, many of which will be difficult to implement and “easily challenged in court.” 

The non-federal stakeholder negotiations made that conflict plain. As the parties worked through the rules draft, negotiators questioned whether Washington was trying to prescribe accreditor standards rather than regulate the process, especially regarding student achievement, faculty, facilities, and student support services.  

They also urged the Education Department to focus on topics such as academic freedom, intellectual diversity, First Amendment rights, and civil rights compliance, cautioning that accreditors are not intended to serve as civil rights investigators and should not be expected to do so. 

These are not marginal disagreements. They go to the heart of what accreditation is for and who defines educational quality.  

To the Education Department’s credit, it’s shown some awareness of its legal limits. As the talks progressed, officials revised parts of the proposal that made it appear as if Washington was directly telling accreditors which standards to adopt. Instead, they focused more on how accreditors would apply and enforce those standards. 

That suggests the administration understands that aggressive reform must withstand legal scrutiny. But it also shows how contested the enterprise has become. This is no longer a technocratic disagreement over wording. It’s a struggle over how far the federal government can go in remaking the accreditation system before reform becomes overreach.  

The politics surrounding the process reinforce the same point. One news account of the negotiated rulemaking noted that colleges and accreditors had fewer seats than in the past. That doesn’t by itself invalidate the process. But it underscores that this isn’t just a peer-review tidying-up exercise. It’s a battle over who defines public interest in higher education and how much deference traditional institutions like accreditors deserve.  

Accreditation only works when it commands widespread trust. Students and families need confidence that accredited colleges meet real standards and offer value. Colleges need confidence that accreditors are not arbitrary, politicized, or echoing federal preferences. The federal government needs confidence that taxpayer-backed aid is tied to something more than institutional habit and inherited prestige.  

When any bond of trust frays, pressure for reform grows. But when reform itself becomes politicized, trust can erode further. That is the danger in the current moment.  

The Education Department is right that the old system too often protected incumbents, tolerated weak outcomes, and resisted competition. But it can weaken a flawed system in the name of improving it. 

If colleges can switch accreditors too easily, low-performing institutions may shop for a friendlier gatekeeper. If wannabe accreditors are recognized hastily, the system may attract weaker referees rather than better ones. And if accreditors are pushed into policing political or constitutional questions beyond their competence, peer review may become an instrument of federal leverage rather than a mechanism of educational judgment. 

Those tensions surfaced repeatedly in the AIM talks held in April under the auspices of the Education Department’s Office of Postsecondary Education, over switching accreditors, major institutional changes, transfer, student complaints, college closures, student protections, due process, and the Department’s proposed “safety valve” for institutions that lose accreditation because of accreditor procedural error.  

Rather than defending the old order, accreditation should be more transparent, more open to new entrants, more attentive to student outcomes, and less deferential to inherited arrangements. But reform must be disciplined by law, institutional realism, and recognition of what accreditors can and cannot do well. 

Now that the first negotiations are over, the stakes are apparent. The college accreditation wars are about more than accreditation. They are about whether higher education will still be governed through trusted intermediary institutions, or whether Washington will try to rule it. 

Can the country build a system that is more open, more accountable, and more honest without making it less lawful, less stable, and less trusted? If this overhaul yields a louder and more partisan accrediting regime, students will be left with what reform was supposed to fix—a system that inspires less confidence when they need more. 

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