President Trump on Wednesday signed a long-anticipated executive order (EO) on accreditation.
The document begins by stating that “the accreditors’ job is to determine which institutions provide a quality education. Unfortunately, accreditors have not only failed in this responsibility to students, families, and American taxpayers, but they have also abused their enormous authority.”
The statement goes on to say that “accreditors routinely approve institutions that are low-quality by the most important measures.”
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Under the order, Education Secretary Linda McMahon is directed, within the strictures of the law, to ensure that, among other things:
- “Barriers are reduced that limit institutions from adopting practices that advance credential and degree completion and spur new models of education.”
- “Institutions support and appropriately prioritize intellectual diversity amongst faculty in order to advance academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, and student learning.”
- “Accreditors are prohibited from engaging in practices that result in credential inflation that burdens students with additional unnecessary costs.”
The secretary is further directed to:
- “Resume recognizing new accreditors to increase competition and accountability in promoting high-quality, high-value academic programs focused on student outcomes.”
- “Mandate that accreditors require member institutions to use data on program-level student outcomes to improve such outcomes, without reference to race, ethnicity, or sex.”
The EO instructs the secretary to create an experimental site to expedite approval of career pathways outside of the legacy accreditation process. This could allow a variety of new providers to gain access to federal Title IV funds.
The new action also addresses the issue of potential conflict between accreditation and state and local law. This has become an issue in recent years in part because of state laws requiring institutions to switch accreditors. The EO, in fact, requires the Education Department to “streamline the process for higher education institutions to change accreditors.”
DEI remains in crosshairs
The EO also continues the administration’s stinging criticism of DEI, stating that “Some accreditors make the adoption of unlawfully discriminatory practices a formal standard of accreditation, and therefore a condition of accessing Federal aid, through ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or ‘DEI’-based standards of accreditation that require institutions to ‘share results on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the context of their mission by considering . . . demographics . . . and resource allocation.’”
As campus leaders know, this and related issues have already received extensive analysis and deliberation throughout the academic community. The administration continues to imply in this EO that a greater breadth of DEI programs are unlawfully discriminatory than would be considered so under current law.
Political and policy context
The order is consistent with Trump’s statements on the campaign trail and since taking office and have been echoed by other administration officials. That said, changing accreditation through public policy is no simple matter. First and foremost, the recognition of accreditation agencies by the education secretary is circumscribed by detailed provisions in the Higher Education Act (HEA). This includes an explicit prohibition against regulating certain areas, including student achievement. There is essentially no chance that this will be changed in the foreseeable future, given the remote prospect of a full-fledged HEA reauthorization.
The administration is, however, in a position to alter the accreditation regulations, and the first Trump administration did just that, garnering “consensus” in a series of negotiated rulemaking sessions that, among other things, broke up the monopoly held by regional accreditors. Changes to the current regulations would require another round of negotiated rulemaking and a formal rulemaking process to follow, but that could be done, although it would take many months.
Short of formal regulatory changes, “sub-regulatory” policy alterations could occur, some of which are embodied in the EO.
Also, remember that accreditation has been sharply criticized on Capitol Hill for many years. It could fairly be said that it is in this particular aspect of higher education that that there is the biggest chasm between what institutional leaders think — and that, generally speaking, is that accreditation is an essential element of institutional quality control and ensures that the academic rules of the road are followed — and what policymakers think, which is that accreditation is seriously flawed. For the latter, all of their concerns about higher education tend to manifest themselves in criticism of the accreditation process.
