The Weaponization of Higher Education Accreditation
Jonathan D. Glater issued a stark warning on March 13 of this year: “The writing is on the wall: The Department [of Education] wants to use accreditation to change what is taught, by whom, and potentially to whom.” The Department will do this by rewriting accreditation standards, decertifying accreditors it does not like, and opening the door for new accreditors it favors.
In April 23 of 2025, The White House issued an Executive Order that aims “to overhaul the higher education accreditation system, ensuring colleges and universities deliver high-quality, high-value education free from unlawful discrimination and ideological overreach.” The Order charges the Secretary of Education to realign accreditation so that it will, among other things:
Resume recognition of new accreditors to foster competition.
Require institutions use program-level student outcome data to improve results, without reference to race, ethnicity, or sex.
Require high-quality, high-value academic programs.
Prioritize intellectual diversity among faculty.
The White House aims to ban use of race, ethnicity, sex in monitoring student outcomes, and to define high quality programs as those that feature ideological diversity (i.e., more conservative perspectives) while eliminating attention to race, ethnicity, and gender. Believing that consideration of race discriminates against white people, the Executive Order takes aim at the American Bar Association’s accreditation standards for law schools and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, both of which require taking race into account.
The White House assumes that universities will comply in order to access the $120 billion in federal student financial aid that is distributed every year. Under the Higher Education Act of 1965, only accredited institutions have that access.
Accreditation is a wonky topic that, at first blush, you may not find interesting. Indeed, writing in the Harvard Law Review in March 2026, Jonathan D. Glater acknowledged that, “Until now, accreditation has not been very high profile.”
But it matters now because attacks on higher education are a part of the playbook used by autocrats. In 2023, John Aubrey Douglass pointed out that “in Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, neonationalist leaders have pursued strategies to alter the governance of universities with the objective of directly or indirectly selecting rectors or presidents and other key academic administrators; influencing or controlling faculty hiring and advancement; punishing dissent, sometimes with imprisonment or through permanent termination of faculty appointments and imposition of travel restrictions; and denying funding for research in areas viewed as opposed to conservative values, such as climate change or gender studies.” He concluded that subduing universities and turning them into “surrogates for the ruling political elite” is part of the strategy right-wing leaders use to solidify their power.”
This is exactly what the Trump administration is doing right now.
Before getting into current actions, a little background on accreditation. Its main purpose is to ensure quality in higher education. To become accredited, an institution assembles a huge amount of data that includes (among many other things) data on student outcomes, for review by a visiting outside committee working with the accreditor.
Some studies find that accredited institutions benefit their students more than non-accredited institutions, and that knowing that an institution is accredited helps. For example, in 2025, Daniel Fisher, William Opoku Agyeman, Anthony Stanowski, and William Tuttle reported a study investigating how graduates from CAHME (Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Management)-accredited programs compare to graduates from non-accredited graduate healthcare administration programs with regard to employment, income postgraduation, and debt burden. Using data from the College Scorecard for the academic years 2018‐2019 and 2020‐2021, they examined these outcomes for each program. They found that in 2019 and 2021, graduates from CAHME-accredited healthcare administration programs were statistically more likely than graduates from non-accredited programs to be employed and to earn more (on average) in their first year after graduation. There were mixed results for the second year. Overall, students from CAHME-accredited programs were more likely to be employed, potentially earned more, and had the same amount of debt burden postgraduation as students from non-accredited healthcare administration programs.
Findings from other studies, however, question accreditation’s role in quality assurance. Cameron Childress, Elizabeth Davidson Pisacreta, and James Dean Ward, writing in February 2026, used IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Data System) data collected over a ten-year period, to examine the link between accreditation, and student learning and graduation. They found that, “data transparency and benchmarking, on their own, are not strong levers for shifting institutional behavior and are better understood as reinforcing existing accountability structures rather than transforming them.” In other words, “While accreditors collect a substantial amount of data about student success, there has been little evidence on whether their use of that data improves institutional outcomes.”
Preston Cooper, in 2024, examined return on investment data from the 2016–17 academic year for colleges and programs accredited by the regional accrediting organizations. He found that all of them accredited higher education institutions in which 25-30% of their graduates received a negative return of investment (i.e., spent more money for their education than they would earn after graduating). Similarly, a 2018 study by the Center for American Progress revealed that many accredited universities produce poor graduation rates, negative return on investment, and weak job placement outcomes. Ricardo Gonzalez and Kathakali Basu argued that university accreditation may be overrated because institutions achieve it for following accreditation procedures more than they do for having a positive impact on student outcomes. This has been a long-standing problem needing attention.
Accreditation has also been criticized as impinging on academic freedom. Based on a review of the literature on accreditation, Michael H. Romanowski and Ibrahim M. Karkouti pointed out in 2022 that, although one can find ample discussion about benefits of the accreditation process, even when it is not tied explicitly to politics, accreditation does impinge on the academic freedom of faculty through standardization, assessments and the fundamental elements of accreditation.
Nonetheless, the current federal overhaul of university accreditation politicizes it in ways that the studies above do not justify.
In January of this year, the Department of Education announced creation of the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) negotiated rulemaking committee to develop regulations in line with the White House’s Executive Order. This committee, which met April 13-17, and is scheduled to meet May 18-22, is addressing a draft of new rules for accreditation. The new rules are to be issued November 1, and to take effect July 1, 2027.
The committee’s posted agenda focuses on deregulation, student outcomes, using merit rather than “immutable characteristics” such as race and gender, and reducing the cost of higher education.
Given this administration’s track record of aggressive attempts to challenge internal workings of higher education (such as faculty hiring, curriculum, admissions criteria, etc.) Jeremy Bauer-Wolf of New America interprets the agenda as developing procedures that would:
1) Allow troubled colleges sanctioned by their accreditor currently to find a new one (which could allow predatory institutions to escape oversight by hopping from one accreditor to another)
2) Bring inexperienced or laissez faire accreditors into the federal system which would weaken the entire system of accreditation;
3) Force colleges to follow the Trump administration’s demands that faculty hiring expand conservative viewpoints within the faculty;
4) Further the White House’s anti-DEI crusade;
5) Allow federal aid to continue to flow to weak or unaccredited institutions that the administration favors.
For those of us who are horrified by the idea of higher education reshaped into the Trump vision, what can we do?
There will be a public comment period sometime during the summer of 2026. Although I am skeptical of that the Department of Education will seriously consider comments that I might make, nonetheless it is important that objections or concerns be registered.
Professional organizations, particularly the American Council on Education (ACE) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) have been filing amicus briefs and supplying expert testimony to challenge Trump’s efforts to remake higher education, citing its violation of the First Amendment, particularly its unlawful attempt to silence acknowledgment of the realities of race and racial discrimination as well as climate change. Organizations such as the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have already successfully secured preliminary injunctions to block Department mandates that would strip funding or accreditation from schools with DEI policies. It is helpful to stay abreast of these efforts.
Lawsuits are being mounted at the state and federal level on the grounds that the Department of Education is exceeding its statutory authority under the Higher Education Act, which expressly limits the Secretary’s power to dictate granular campus policies like faculty hiring and curriculum, and to specify what accreditation standards require. The Secretary determines whether an accrediting agency is complying with the law but should not be setting accreditation standards.