How the Trump Admin Could Speed Up a Controversial New Accreditor

The Trump administration’s proposed revamp of college accreditation rules could speed up the UNC System’s effort to launch a new accreditor for public universities.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education’s Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization committee agreed to an extensive set of proposed new regulations that would ease the process for accreditors to enter the market and add new standards, including assessing universities’ commitment to academic freedom and policies for transfer students. 

Accreditors ensure that colleges and universities meet certain finance, governance, and academic standards. Institutions must have the recognition of a Department of Education-approved accreditor in order for students to get federal financial aid. But conservatives have accused accreditors of forcing colleges to adopt progressive ideas, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Other critics say the process is too onerous and time-consuming. 

Last summer, the UNC System announced it would form a new accreditor, known as the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), alongside other Southern public university systems, including Florida’s. The project was immediately controversial after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis framed it as a way to push back against “woke” ideology in higher ed, but UNC System officials have maintained that the accreditor won’t be political.

Under current federal regulations, new accreditors must engage in accreditation activity for at least two years before seeking recognition from the Department of Education. But President Donald Trump has pushed to make it easier for new accreditors to enter the market.

The draft regulations would only require newcomers to demonstrate “sufficient accreditation experience” to submit an application for recognition. This includes establishing standards and a process for accrediting institutions, and going through that process with at least one college or university. CPHE adopted its accreditation standards last October. Several UNC System schools have applied for CPHE accreditation; they will remain accredited through their current agencies during that process.

Dan Harrison, the UNC System’s vice president for academic affairs, said at the Board of Governors meeting last week that the new regulations “effectively could slice up to a year off of our timeline” for CPHE to be approved. Harrison, who helped steer its formation and has led its initial work, said that federal recognition is now possible by the second half of 2027.

In a Tuesday statement, CPHE applauded the rulemaking committee for delivering “significant progress toward a stronger accreditation system that is laser-focused on student success.”

But the fledgling accreditor also said the “final package is not perfect.” The new rules will require accreditors to scrutinize new areas of higher education, which could conflict with CPHE’s goal of streamlining accreditation for public schools and potentially raise their costs.

For example, the draft regulations would require accreditors to assess whether higher education institutions “maintain the integrity of research and scholarly activity.” This includes evaluating colleges’ and universities’ policies on plagiarism, falsification, and “coordinated practices intended to inflate or misrepresent scholarly impact.”

Mark Becker, CPHE’s board chair and a member of the Department of Education’s rulemaking committee, said that the obligation these provisions impose “is another example of increasing the cost of higher education by creating new burdens and new lawsuits,” according to Inside Higher Ed.

Although CPHE’s recently adopted standards seek to evaluate whether an institution “demonstrates integrity across its organization and its activities,” it does not have any specific standards on research misconduct. 

Enforcing Freedom

The new rules also would require accreditors to ensure universities maintain academic freedom protections “that are clearly articulated and applied consistently to faculty regardless of appointment classification, race, or other immutable characteristics, viewpoint, or ideology.”

The Department of Education said the new provision will address what officials see as institutions becoming “echo chambers focused on discriminatory ideology and unlawful discriminatory practices.”

Accreditors have long measured whether universities maintained commitments to values like academic freedom, intellectual diversity, and free speech. But Robert Shireman, an accreditation expert and Democratic member of an Education Department advisory board, said the draft regulations insert the federal government into the process in a new way.

“What’s different is now the accreditors will be looking over their shoulder to make sure that the federal government is OK with the way that they’re enforcing academic freedom, and that’s where I see the real problem,” Shireman said.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which includes several UNC System schools as well as private schools like Duke University, said the new regulations are too broad and vague.

“It risks turning accreditation into a mechanism for enforcing whatever political agenda is in power,” she said.

The UNC System went through a contentious process to define academic freedom earlier this year. The definition was modeled on one that the system’s Faculty Assembly drafted, but the effort drew pushback from some faculty when staff added a list of “parameters” of academic freedom for faculty.

The Education Department’s proposed regulations also ask accreditors to assess how graduates perform on standardized assessments, licensure or certification results, and other outcome measures. Kyle Beltramini, an expert on accreditation and a senior research fellow at the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni, noted that the proposal would ask accreditors to look at those metrics for individual programs within colleges and universities as well.

That’s in line with changes in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which restricts federal student loans to programs whose graduates make more than people without the same degree.

Beltramini said the accreditation regulation is aimed at “several programs that were leaving students with life-altering debt that they had no chance of paying back at the wages that they were getting.”

But Pasquerella argued that programs should not merely be assessed on their economic value.

“If the focus is solely on getting people jobs that are going to be high paying, as opposed to teaching them how to think critically … then I fear that higher education and our democracy are both going to be in trouble,” she said.

Getting Credit 

The proposed rules would also would direct accreditors to require colleges and universities to make transferring easier by offering credit for courses taken at other accredited institutions, as long as the content is comparable. The Education Department said transfer students often have to re-take classes, wasting time and incurring debt.

That could prompt some North Carolina schools to change their policies. Currently, courses taken at community colleges are not eligible for transfer credit at Duke, although in the next few years, the university will launch a new guaranteed transfer pathway for a select cohort of students from Durham Technical Community College. Duke didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Shireman said that while current rules place the onus on students to prove a course taken elsewhere should count, the new regulations mean “the college has to presume that it’s comparable course content unless they demonstrate otherwise.” 

Beltramini added that accreditors would need to affirm that universities provide transfer credit evaluations upfront.

“I love this change because I think that one of the biggest issues is an information asymmetry between students and their institutions,” Beltramini said. “The inability to transfer credits is one of the easiest ways to prevent a student from being able to get a degree in a timely manner.”

Not everyone is on board. Pasquerella worries it will allow students to transfer credits from accredited for-profit institutions that don’t offer a comparable education.

“We must make it easier to access higher education and to transfer credits, but this is something quite different,” she said. “ I’m not sure that any of [the federal government’s] proposals actually achieve those overriding objectives.” 

Shireman also said the end result could just be schools limiting the number of transfer students to avoid having to accept certain credits.

The next step is for the Education Department to release the draft rules for public comment. If finalized, Beltramini said he expects they would take effect in summer 2027.