The Education Department’s Proposed Overhaul of college Accreditation Is Here

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The Education Department on Monday released the draft proposals for new regulations on how accreditors oversee colleges and how the government oversees the accreditors. The department’s recommendations, foreshadowed in comments by Nicholas Kent, the under secretary, add new layers of responsibility for both accreditors and colleges and seek to codify the administration’s ideological agenda for higher education.

Colleges must be approved by a federally recognized accreditor in order for their students to be eligible for federal student aid.

The draft regulations largely follow the priorities laid out in an executive order from President Trump, which focused on making it easier for new accreditors to be approved by the department, simplifying the process for colleges to move to new accreditors, and ensuring that the accreditors aren’t requiring their members to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion.


Many of the proposed rules were widely expected, including:

Streamlining the timeline and requirements for new accrediting agencies.
Requiring accreditors to reduce any unnecessary bureaucratic demands on member colleges.
Mandating that accreditors set minimum benchmarks for student achievement that include measuring return on investment.

But even as the department seeks to reduce its own role overseeing accreditors, the regulations would impose new demands on accreditors in assessing institutions. Accreditors would have to ensure that:

All of their own and their members’ policies and procedures comply with both federal and state laws, “including the prohibition of preferential treatment based on protected characteristics, such as race-based scholarships or programs, and preferential hiring or promotion practices.”
Colleges comply with the First Amendment and require “viewpoint and ideological neutrality in policy implementation, with protection for religious institutions.”
Institutions provide “support for and appropriate prioritization of intellectual diversity amongst faculty.”
Adding any new standards for accreditors may also run into problems with the Higher Education Act. The law limits the department’s authority on what it can demand of the organizations, which are private, nonprofit associations.

In addition to piling new responsibilities onto accreditors, some draft regulations are sure to draw widespread opposition from even the colleges and accreditors that are widely sympathetic to the administration’s aims. Chief among those is a proposal to require colleges “to presume the transferability of credits earned at another institution toward general-education requirements, not only as electives.”

The department has framed that as a way to make college more affordable, and although there may be some agreement from consumer and student advocates, colleges view the approval of credit transfer as a key component of institutional autonomy.

Discussions on the draft regulations by a committee of negotiators will take place next week and again from May 18 through 22.