Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on January 31, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
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.
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…
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This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
