[Editor’s note: With a new presidential administration come new opportunities to change the process by which universities qualify for student loan dollars. Below, Scott Yenor discusses the theory and practice of accreditation reform. Please check this space next week for Samuel Negus on accreditation-reform tactics.]
Accreditors often claim to be neutral arbiters who merely measure whether accredited universities meet their own standards. Yet a not-so-deep dive into actual accreditation standards reveals a stacked deck, whereby accreditors ask certain questions and do not ask other questions. The Trump administration promises to challenge the current accreditation system’s transparent political bent with some politics of its own. Reverberations are already being felt across the accreditation system.
Changing accreditation standards is, for Trump, “the secret weapon” in higher-education reform.During his campaign, President Trump promised to fire, in his inimitable words, “the radical Left accreditors that have allowed [America’s] colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.” Changing accreditation standards is, for Trump, “the secret weapon” in higher-education reform. Accreditation standards are a lever since they are connected to federal student aid. No accreditation, no federal grants and loans. Trump promises “to fire accreditors” who do not, among other things, change course away from diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and personnel and toward things like “implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money’s worth.”
Can Trump “fire” accreditors? Absolutely, but it is a bit complicated. Accreditation agencies are ostensibly private entities serving important public purposes—they are a typical neoliberal private-public partnership akin to immigration re-allocation charities. Accreditors are creatures of American law. The United States Department of Education (USED) regulates accreditors. Accreditors carry out public policy. Universities fund accreditors through fees. If the federal government cannot immediately touch misbehaving accreditors, it can mediately do so.
America now doles out more than $100 billion in federal student aid per year, as of 2023. This Title IV Federal Student Aid flows only to institutions of higher education “accredited by a nationally recognized accrediting agency.” USED has authority to recognize accreditors, but its powers are hidden under piles of regulation. Standards to recognize accreditors, hardly yielding geometric certainty, are found in the Higher Education Act (as amended in 1992) and USED regulations. Approved accreditors must, among other things and according to the Congressional Research Service, (1) “apply and enforce standards that ensure the education programs offered are of sufficient quality to meet the stated objective for which they are offered”; (2) “use review standards that assess student achievement in relation to the institution’s mission, including, as applicable, course completion, passage of state licensing examinations, and job placement rates”; and (3) “evaluate … an institution’s or program’s curricula, faculty, facilities, and fiscal and administrative capacity.”
While USED does not directly accredit any institution, it accredits the accreditors to be “a reliable authority as to the quality of education or training offered” at an institution of higher education for the purposes of Title IV funding. The Accreditation Group within USED’s Office of Postsecondary Education can re-approve accrediting agencies periodically. USED can, at any time, revoke recognition if an accreditor is deemed ineffective or, perhaps, out of compliance with existing standards.
USED under the Biden administration acted to protect accreditors, too. USED must approve a university’s switch from one accreditor to another, and it sat on applications from Florida universities to switch accreditors for years as a means of stalling Florida’s higher-education reforms. New entrants into the accreditation marketplace hardly even tried under the Biden administration, since the personnel were stacked against them. Under this ongoing system, the public arm of the private-public partnership protects the private arm, while the private arm does things that the public arm is prevented from doing in law, like mandating diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and nudging institutions toward left-wing curricular changes.
Instead of unilateral disarmament, Trump and his administration promise to use public power.Existing accreditors understood the stakes after President Trump’s 2024 victory. In December 2024, the Western States higher-education accreditor, WSCUC, floated a proposal to replace diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria with accreditation standards that emphasized “success for all students.” Trump-proofing with a light touch seemed to be behind the proposal. The WSCUC “change” followed the model of Utah’s mostly fake DEI ban, which allowed most DEI personnel to continue doing what they were doing but under the less offensive banners of “student success” or “success for all.” Nevertheless, WSCUC withdrew its milquetoast changes weeks later after harsh criticism from establishment actors.
One of WSCUC’s peer reviewers, for instance, Dean Jackie Gardina of Santa Barbara and Ventura School of Law, cried, “Et tu, WSCUC!” In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Gardina counseled resistance to what she saw as the tyrannical Trump administration: “The proposed revision runs counter to the ‘first rule for combating tyranny—do not obey in advance.’” Gardina thinks DEI initiatives are indispensable to combat “long-standing inequities in higher education and the systemic barriers that exist for students from underrepresented and marginalized communities.”
Dean Gardina celebrates how WSCUC foists DEI policies on colleges today but thinks it would be “tyranny” to rid colleges of DEI policies tomorrow. She does not oppose imposing morality on colleges. But only left-wing, diversity morality, she apparently believes, should be imposed. Even half-hearted reforms will have to be extorted at gunpoint from accreditors—and President Trump shows every sign of wanting to unholster his biggest guns.
This episode lays bare the political nature of accreditation. Current accreditors act on the assumption that Trump is a tyrant. Instead of unilateral disarmament, Trump and his administration promise to use public power to disable those who have overseen the cratering in public confidence in higher education. WSCUC has announced its hostility to Trump’s mission. It is a political actor. WSCUC should pay by surrendering its power to accredit institutions. That would kickstart all attempts to restore a better vision of education and begin the process of restoring Americans’ trust in higher ed.
Scott Yenor is senior director of state coalitions for the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life and a professor of political science at Boise State University.
This article was originally published at www.jamesgmartin.center
