The Department of Education is taking its next major step toward overhauling the college accreditation system, inviting higher ed policy experts to suggest nominees for an upcoming negotiating committee. But while the Monday announcement sheds more light on the Trump administration’s priorities, it provides no concrete plan on how they intend to make those goals a reality.
President Trump has long declared accreditation reform his “secret weapon,” and the department had already signaled its desire for change.
Now, the department turns its attention to rewriting the rules that govern accreditors—a process that will involve convening an advisory committee to provide input on the changes. That committee will discuss up to 10 topics outlined in the Federal Register notice, though much of the attention is expected to focus on making it easier for new accreditors to join the market, increasing the agencies’ focus on data-driven student performance benchmarks, and scrubbing any existing diversity, equity and inclusion standards.
“Rather than focusing on whether member institutions offer high-quality programs that benefit students and the workforce, the current accreditation regime has become a protectionist system that shields existing players, fuels rising costs, drives credential inflation, adds administrative bloat … and promotes ideologically driven initiatives,” Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent said in a statement. “We welcome nominations from key stakeholders willing to challenge the status quo.”
Nominations for committee members are due Feb. 27, and the two weeklong rulemaking sessions are slated for April and May. How exactly Kent and his staff will seek to change the rules is not yet clear, and the department will likely share more specifics closer to the actual sessions.
Colleges have to be approved by a federally recognized accreditor in order to access federal student aid, and that gatekeeping role has led to more scrutiny on the agencies in recent years. So, while policy experts on both sides of the political aisle have long agreed that the accreditation system needs to improve, their views on how to make that happen differ.
Some, including left-leaning advocacy groups, want to see new standards focused on improving graduation and job placement rates, but fear that by opening the gates entirely to new accreditors the quality of evaluation will be tanked. And others, including more right-leaning research groups, say that until new agencies gain recognition, the system will lack the innovation needed to resolve concerns like intellectual diversity and college affordability.
Leaders from the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, the two largest accreditation associations, said they “welcomed” and “looked forward to” the upcoming rulemaking meetings but also warned the department not to exceed its statutory authority and violate academic freedoms.
“As this process unfolds, it will be critical that any reforms recognize the essential role of peer review and respect institutional autonomy,” said CHEA president Nasser Paydar in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “CHEA looks forward to engaging constructively with the Department and fellow negotiators on specific proposals as they are developed, with a shared focus on supporting students and educational quality.”
Adding New Accreditors
Even before this round of rulemaking, the Education Department has worked to make it easier for new accreditors to gain federal recognition and for colleges to switch agencies. Most recently, the department awarded $14.5 million in grants in support of its accreditation agenda.
Now, the department plans to back that financial investment with a regulatory one, by removing what it has called unnecessary red tape and fast-tracking new accreditors into a state of government recognition. Aspiring accreditors will have a seat at the negotiating table, according to the rulemaking notice.
But accreditation policy experts, even those who support the idea in theory, say it’s unclear how ED can rework the process given several bright lines outlined in statute about what it takes to become a government-approved accreditor.
For example, accreditors must have operated for at least two years before gaining recognition. And while Kyle Beltramini, a senior research fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, fully supports the idea of making it easier for new accreditors to enter the market, he said the time requirement is something that cannot be changed without Congressional approval.
“Our dream package would be one which does allow and indeed incentivize the creation of new high-quality accreditors … we do want to see innovation in this area,” Beltramini said. However, “this is fundamentally going to be about dealing with reform on the margins to make it as easy as possible for new agencies to put in applications with the department and signaling that we will prioritize moving you along as quickly as we can given existing statute.”
If anything, Beltramini predicts that the Trump administration may propose a proactive fast track option for applicants that says, as long as all paperwork is in and all statutory standards are met, an accreditation agency can be approved automatically. But even he was hesitant about that.
“That would be a bit dangerous, because we want to ensure that existing accreditors and new accreditors have a level playing field where the same level of scrutiny, if, frankly, not a higher level of scrutiny, is applied to newer people that are trying to enter the marketplace,” he said. “We want new higher quality accreditors, rather than lower quality accreditors, to pop up.”
Cutting DEI Standards
Along with allowing new accreditors to enter the ecosystem, the Trump administration has also aimed to shut down the so-called “woke” standards of existing ones—particularly when it comes to the consideration of demographics like race, gender and sexuality. (Many of which have already been rolled back or made more flexible in response to the administration’s political pressure.)
But now, based on Monday’s announcement, experts say the administration may also be looking to accomplish broader goals like boosting intellectual diversity and conservative representation among faculty. As is the case with introducing new accreditors, higher ed policy experts remain uncertain how the Trump administration intends to do so without violating the law.
Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education, a lead institutional lobbying group, said one provision the Trump administration has repeatedly discussed and he will be looking out for is granting accreditors the ability to evaluate a campus’s intellectual diversity for purposes of ensuring conservative voices have academic freedom on campus.
“We do appreciate in the Federal Register notice that [the department] mentions advancing academic freedom. We definitely want that too. So depending on how the department implements that, maybe we could be in agreement,” Guillory said. But if the department were to directly limit what perspectives can and cannot exist on campus and to what degree, he added, it would be a blatant infringement on institutional autonomy.
“There are even accreditors saying, ‘we’re not sure that that’s the proper place for us,’” he said.
Robert Shireman—a longtime accreditation expert who currently works with a left-leaning think tank and is serving on the department’s accreditation advisory committee—added that judging intellectual diversity would be “a very dangerous direction for the federal government to go.”
“We have long cared, and most people still do care, about access in higher education and making sure that we don’t have either administrative or cultural barriers that prevent people from enrolling or succeeding in higher education,” he said.
Restricting DEI strategies or steering faculty viewpoints would work against that goal.
“We’re going backwards in terms of equal opportunity. And so I do not want to see this administration do anything further,” he said. “We need colleges to pay attention to systematic denials of opportunity, and if those systematic denials of opportunity are happening.”
Focusing on Student Outcomes
The department also plans to increase the focus accreditors place on data-driven benchmarks for student outcomes and workforce development.
Although this concept has bipartisan support, Shireman described it as “one of the most difficult and entangled issues in higher ed.”
For example, he said, “It is easy for advocates from the outside, and sometimes even from the inside to say, ‘Gosh, obviously there should be a minimum graduation rate.’ But then, whenever anyone tries to actually implement things like that it gets really messy.” The Biden administration sought to require accreditation to set benchmarks for student achievement but didn’t have enough time to finalize the rule.
Multiple higher ed policy experts told Inside Higher Ed that federal law is contradictory when it comes to student-outcomes and accreditation. In the Higher Education Act, they explained, accreditors are essentially told that they should have student achievement standards, but the secretary can’t be the one to establish any specific criteria for those achievement standards.
Emily Rounds, an education policy adviser at Third Way, a left-of-center think tank, has championed introducing higher outcome standards in the accreditation process. She thinks that the department could require agencies to set their own more explicit benchmarks.
“That way, the Secretary is not telling an accreditor what the exact benchmark needs to be, but rather directing the agency to work with its institutions to set benchmarks for continuous improvement and for student achievement that makes the most sense for the institution and its student,” Rounds explained.
Republicans in Congress have shown increasing interest in changing the federal laws that govern accreditors, which could aid in the department’s plans. Proposed legislation would bar accreditors from setting DEI standards and allow states to play a greater role in designating accreditors. Lawmakers also want to set student outcome standards related to student earnings, median cost of attendance, completion rates, loan repayment rates, among other factors.
If the department’s plans align with congressional Republicans, particularly related to the outcome standards, that could be a sticking point for institutions, Guillory said.
“Because we’ve seen some similarities and what that bill attempts to accomplish and what the department has outlined in its areas that it hopes to consider within this upcoming negotiated rule making session, then we can, in some ways, read the writing on the wall,” he said.
This piece was originally published by Inside Higher Ed on January 27, 2026.