Higher education seemingly played an important if largely negative role in the recent presidential election. Exit polls showed that non-college-educated voters overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump. Many voters associated Kamala Harris unfavorably with progressive trends and ideas prevalent on elite campuses, such as pro-Hamas protests and gender ideology.
Trump’s statement was a surprisingly complete summary of the policy wonk’s accreditation-reform wish list.The election’s outcome has sparked introspection in some typically left-leaning publications, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, where William Deresiewicz opined bluntly, “The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas … have been rejected.” But what any of this means for likely post-election policy is unclear.
Trump’s lengthiest statement on the subject came in a two-minute video released in July 2023, which Elon Musk recently reposted to a viral reception. Then-candidate Trump vowed to “fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.” Policies outlined for achieving that end included “accepting applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges,” such as requiring them to “defend the American tradition and Western civilization, protect free speech, and eliminate wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs.” Trump further promised to eliminate colleges’ “diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats” and incentivize the adoption of “accelerated … low-cost degrees [with] meaningful job placement.”
Campaign statements are seldom a reliable guide to future events. All policy reforms cost time, attention, and effort, all of which will be scarce for the new Congress’s slender Republican majority. But Trump’s concise video statement is a surprisingly complete summary of the conservative-leaning higher-education policy wonk’s accreditation-reform wish list. If it is any indication, decades’ worth of think-tank policy proposals may find a receptive audience in the White House.
Grievances with the accreditation system relate, directly or indirectly, to the agencies’ role as “gatekeepers” for federal tuition-aid programs under Title IV of the Higher Education Act (HEA). As Boston University president Jon Westling told an audience at the Heritage Foundation 30 years ago, Title IV programs functioned “with a minimum of government involvement” until Congress’s fateful decision in 1972 to “lift the ceiling [on default rates] beyond what any commercial lender would tolerate.” Subsequent ceiling increases followed, and, by the early ’90s, default rates exceeded 30 percent for student loans made to some institutions. In response, Congress created the gatekeeper role for the six regional accreditors, transforming them into “an enforcement wing” of the federal state. In theory, they are independent trade associations, but the secretary of education sets standards for their recognition as Title IV gatekeepers, directly shaping most of their accreditation requirements. Likewise, accreditation is theoretically voluntary, but access to the billions of dollars disbursed annually in Title IV aid is indispensable for most institutions.
Conservative critiques of this system are twofold: that it functions as a cartel to protect existing market players from competition against more cost-effective, innovative business models and that agencies are not well suited to their role as public audit masters. The most likely reforms Trump’s second administration and a Republican Congress might adopt fall into three broad categories: anti-DEI measures, outcomes-based adjustments to accreditation standards, and removing the Title IV gatekeeper role from accreditors entirely.
The possibilities for each are summarized below.
Accreditors function as a cartel to protect existing market players from competition.Anti-DEI Measures
On DEI mandates, Heritage Foundation senior fellow Lindsey Burke writes in Project 2025 that Congress “should amend the HEA to prohibit accreditation agencies from [requiring] diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.” Fourteen states have already adopted laws of this type, for example Florida’s prohibition of DEI statements in hiring processes and mandate that institutions regularly audit campus speech policies and viewpoint diversity. A similar bill, sponsored by Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah passed the U.S. House in September. It would prohibit accrediting agencies from requiring as a condition of access to Title IV aid a “commit[ment] to supporting the disparate treatment of any individual or groups … except as required by Federal law.”
Anti-DEI bills aim at various laudable ends, such as student and faculty speech rights, viewpoint neutrality in publicly subsidized institutions, and non-discriminatory employment practices. But they risk setting dangerous precedents. Accrediting agencies profess to judge program quality without dictating intellectual content. This distinction is rather fine and of dubious validity. Nevertheless, accreditors seldom take disciplinary action for program content. While conservatives intend anti-DEI bills to de-weaponize accreditation in campus culture wars, left-leaning lawmakers and higher-education leaders denounce them as “politicization.” Retaliatory laws adopted under future Democratic majorities might produce a regulatory regime more objectionable than the current status quo.
Outcomes-Based Accreditation Reforms
In the most consequential accreditation reform of the first Trump administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos permitted institutions to select agencies without reference to geography. Title IV aid recipients may now by accredited by any of the six former “regionals” or any other agency recognized by the secretary. This removes what Michael Brickman calls “a distinction without a difference” in a functionally two-tier system, introducing a degree of competition into the accreditation marketplace. Conservative higher-education policy writers have long advocated such market reforms. Two decades ago, the Martin Center’s own George Leef suggested that states should “require their universities [to] adopt competitive bidding for accreditation services.” Taking advantage of DeVos’s accreditation reforms, several have adopted legislation to that effect, including North Carolina and Florida. Proposals for outcomes-based reform typically include plans to increase the diversity and competitiveness of this marketplace.
Burke writes that the next education secretary should “make provisional accreditation for start-ups easier,” permit “fast track accreditation … and longer accreditation periods” for institutions meeting certain benchmarks,” and “make recognition of new accreditors easier.” Her colleague Jonathan Butcher goes even further, suggesting legislation that would permit “any business or institution [to] become a recognized accreditor.” Congress may not go that far, but Senator Mike Lee of Utah has already introduced a bill authorizing the secretary to recognize state-created agencies as Title IV accreditors.
New accreditors will do little to change the system without more flexible rules for their permissible standards.New accrediting agencies will do little to change the system without more flexible rules for their permissible standards, of course. Brickman notes that while the existing system is “adept at setting basic rules about … operational stability,” it is less effective “at determining whether academic programs … are high-quality, relevant to opportunity for employment, and likely to lead to good student outcomes.” While colleges and students should value learning for its own sake, Congress appropriates billions of public dollars for tuition-aid programs because it wants to see increases in graduates’ earning power, macroeconomic growth, and expansion of the federal tax base. Writing for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Andrew Gillen proposes restructured access to Title IV aid on a sliding scale. Using publicly reported data on graduates’ median debt and earnings three years after completion, Gillen and his coauthors rated the employment outcomes of every program accredited by the major agencies. Gillen proposes a four-tier classification system that would reward successful programs with “exemption from most regulatory oversight” and “unrestricted expansion of [Title IV-funded] enrollment,” cap Title IV aid to less successful programs, and exclude the worst performers entirely.
Gillen’s analytical metric is too rudimentary to regulate multi-billion-dollar federal programs in practice, but one prospective new accreditor is field-testing a much more sophisticated algorithm. The Postsecondary Commission compares program graduates’ earnings to demographically identical control groups who did not attend college. Lawmakers could adopt this promising approach to hold institutions accountable for taxpayers’ return on investment.
Other outcomes-based accreditation reforms would hold institutions directly liable for unacceptable student-loan default rates with financial penalties. Glenn Harlan Reynolds proposed such a scheme in The Higher Education Bubble, analogizing the student-loan market to the mortgage industry now subjected to punitive fines under the Dodd-Frank Act. Senator Lee’s recent bill includes such a measure, as did an earlier bill from Senator Rick Scott of Florida.
Eliminating the Title IV Gatekeeper Role
Such meliorative outcomes-based reforms are all promising, but it may be preferable simply to sever Title IV oversight from accreditors entirely. Westling argued that Congress should “eliminate the link between accreditation and eligibility for federal funds,” allowing agencies to focus on “the quality of academic programs, not … default [rates] on government-backed loans.” It is long past time to do so.
As Gillen has pointed out, the status quo actually limits accreditors’ ability to critically evaluate academic quality. In a system tied to federal funding in which colleges are either accredited or not, “withdrawing accreditation [is] a virtual death sentence.” Prospective students may wish to know if a college’s freshman-composition instruction is consistently poor, but accreditors are understandably reticent to risk killing institutions for such reasons. Available data readily demonstrate this pattern. The Postsecondary Commission analyzed a database of more than 30,000 regulatory actions by the regional accreditors dating back to 1998. Disciplinary action for poor program quality and academic outcomes accounted for only three percent of all entries. The agencies’ own reports show that serious disciplinary measures are taken very rarely and almost always for the finding of insufficient financial resources. In an accreditation system that serves as audit master for public funds, the only real sin is insolvency.
Why not cut out the middleman and have institutions file audits with the U.S. Treasury Department?Arguably, accrediting agencies are not even well suited to this work. My institution’s accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, invariably lists “budgeting/finance expertise” as a critical need in its annual call for applicants to its peer-reviewer corps. The skills and interests that lead people through graduate school into higher-education careers do not frequently overlap with those necessary to discern whether someone is cooking the books in multi-million-dollar institutional budgets. Brickman proposes that, in lieu of accrediting-agency audits, Congress should “require institutions to protect taxpayers and students by purchasing [private] insurance.” In fact, accreditors already require colleges to file certified audits of their finances by independent third parties. Why not simply cut out the middleman and have institutions file such audits with the U.S. Treasury Department to qualify as Title IV recipients?
Will the second Trump administration and a narrowly Republican-controlled Congress attempt something so bold, or any of these other less sweeping reform proposals? Only time will tell. For now, the only thing certain is that college accreditation is about as interestingly newsworthy as this esoteric and rather dull subject gets.
Samuel Negus is director of program review and accreditation at Hillsdale College.
This article was originally published at www.jamesgmartin.center
