The Commission for Public Higher Education, the accreditation agency for state universities founded by the UNC System and several other Southern states, has gotten off to a quick start in its first six months.
Officials have settled on the standards CPHE will use to measure schools and announced an initial cohort of 10 universities that it will assess as it prepares to seek formal recognition from the U.S. Department of Education in 2027. The agency is now selecting peer reviewers who will evaluate the participating schools.
The group has big ambitions. Near the top of the list for next year is expanding the agency’s reach beyond the South, said Dan Harrison, the UNC System vice president for academic affairs who guided the development of CPHE and is leading much of its initial work.
“Instead of being bound by geography, we want to have a membership that is nationwide, that is made up of publics,” Harrison said.
As the agency’s first calendar year winds down, The Assembly spoke with Harrison about his thoughts on CPHE’s development and what else is in store for 2026.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
CPHE recently announced the initial cohort of 10 universities that have applied to join. How do you feel about the group, and what does it say about interest?
It’s a tremendous cohort. I thought we would get maybe six institutions and that it would be hard to get to six. And instead, we passed six almost immediately. We got to 10 pretty quickly. And we had to say, for bandwidth purposes, that’s the maximum number of institutions that we can responsibly process applications from as a group.
We were able to get institutions from four of the six founding systems. We were able to get one institution that’s not in the founding systems. And we were able to get institutions ranging from enrollment of a couple thousand, all the way up to those R1s and 30,000-plus. In pure numbers, in terms of breadth, in terms of sort of demand moving forward, I think it’s just really an extraordinary group.
We’ll continue to accept applications in 2026, probably on a rolling basis, not necessarily as a cohort again.
The cohort includes three UNC System schools: UNC Charlotte, Appalachian State University, and N.C. Central University. Did you have conversations with those schools, or did they express interest on their own?
Through my regular job, I’m in pretty regular contact with provosts, in particular. So I think the conversations naturally came up. We had a number of other institutions in the system express interest, and we wanted to make sure that there was plenty of room for our partner systems to send institutions to this first cohort, too.
The three that we have are, obviously, terrific institutions. I think they speak to the breadth of the cohort, with UNC Charlotte being an R1. We have a super institution in Appalachian State. One thing that’s really fun is Appalachian State’s big football rival [Georgia Southern University] is also in the cohort, so I think that that’s critical to our success. I’m really excited about that.
Has CPHE picked sides in the rivalry?
Oh, no. Good question, though. That’s the toughest question I’ve been asked about CPHE.
And then with Central, having an HBCU in the cohort is extraordinary. When you think about peer review, HBCUs are one axis, so getting in the first cohort a really strong, nationally known HBCU with great leadership is going to open the door, I think, to doing a lot more there, as well.
At a Board of Governors meeting last month, UNC Asheville Chancellor Kimberly van Noort asked if you could “hold a spot” for them. You’ve said the next schools will be accepted on a rolling basis. How will that process work, and how many more schools do you expect to take on?
Back when we thought we would have about six in the first cohort, we thought that by the time we applied for recognition by the Department of Education, we would have about 20 in some stage of the process, whether actually accredited or having applied.
There’s no magic number we need to get to for the purposes of recognition, so we’re more concerned sort of about doing it right than about achieving any particular number. But I think we’re going to have a lot of demand.
Our goals for 2026 are to make good on that idea of being a nationwide accreditor that is for public universities. We definitely have continued interest within both the UNC System and the other five participating systems, and I think that we’re going to get several more institutions from there. I’m also pretty bullish on getting institutions that are outside of [the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges’] traditional footprint, which is great because, again, the whole model here is not geography, it’s the type of institution. We’ll see what happens, but I’m pretty hopeful that that’s going to come to fruition in 2026.
Do you have other regions in mind or are you casting a wide net?
A super wide net. As we’ve gone around and talked to folks, what’s become apparent is that it is the mainstream opinion that accreditation needs reform of some kind. That is an opinion that I think is safe to say is held by center-left organizations, center-right organizations, certainly people actually on campus who live and breathe accreditation. Everyone agrees with the proposition that accreditation is in need of reform. What resonates nationwide is the value proposition. People love the idea of rethinking it as an all-public model. Nobody in any state loves what I would describe as needless bureaucracy, and everybody in higher ed cares about student success. It’s really not a regional thing or a partisan thing. When you strip it down to the basics of what we’re trying to do, it resonates pretty much everywhere.
CPHE is seeking peer reviewers to assess the initial cohort. How will that work?
We have collected approximately 90 CVs, which is beyond where I thought we would be on CV collection. We’re going to form the teams out of that pool. We continue to accept CVs on a rolling basis because we’ll use the same pool not just for the initial 10, but indefinitely.
We got a great breakdown of buckets of personnel. We’ve got some chief executives, we’ve got some CFOs. We’ve got a great deal of faculty involvement, which is great. And these folks are both from within the six systems and from outside the six systems. Based on that response, none of the peer reviewers will review an institution in their own system. That’s not something that’s required by the law, it’s just something that we feel helps mitigate the chance of something being perceived as self-dealing. So we’re kind of going above what’s strictly required when we form those teams.
We haven’t seen other states put up the same monetary contributions for CPHE as Florida, which chipped in $4 million. How do you feel about the agency’s finances and staffing so far?
We’re in a really strong place. Along with me, Cameron Howell from South Carolina and Thomas McBrayer [from the UNC System], serving a director of operation-style role, are the staff of CPHE.
Staff scales with membership to some extent. Depending on how quickly we want to expand, staffing will have to be worked out. In 2026 or certainly prior to recognition, or even applying for recognition, there’ll have to be permanent staff paid by the accreditor. We can’t really apply without permanent staff, so that’s the true, drop-dead inflection point that has to be resolved.
What we’ve been able to do with the funding we have presently is say that no applicant institution has to pay membership dues or application fees to us until we’re recognized.
For context, the Florida money has been allotted to their university foundation and CPHE is able to draw that down in the same way that you would make an ask of any charitable foundation. That’s not money that is sitting in CPHE’s coffers at present.
It seems like CPHE may have forced some competition in the accreditation landscape. SACSCOC, for instance, has a new president who announced some changes geared toward providing more transparency and accountability. What do you think about that?
When we put our standards out for comment, we got some very helpful comments from some of the existing accreditors and also from the Council of Higher Education Accreditation. We’ve also had some very friendly chats since then with folks at the existing accreditors. I think that’s all to the good.
I think that there is accreditation reform happening nationwide. I think that Dr. [Stephen] Pruitt at SACS was a great hire for them. If I were at an institution, the things I would be thinking about are: what of these reforms are enshrined, and what are wholly dependent on the personnel at the time? Because if it’s wholly dependent on the personnel at the time, then it could always swing back in the direction that it was in the past. What of these reforms are going to be sticky? What actually gets through and what doesn’t?
Just to plug CPHE, the one thing that I think we’re doing that is critical, that I don’t know if anybody else is thinking about it in these terms, is the all-public model. I think that’s something that’s always going to be a unique feature of CPHE.
There’s also an appetite in Washington for changes in accreditation under the Trump administration. Do you anticipate recent changes at the education department impacting CPHE’s pursuit of recognition in any way?
That would require statutory change. Both the department and the process that accreditors have to go through are creatures of statute, which very well could change. I don’t know. We’ll see if that happens, but absent that, there’s always going to be a process. It’s always going to be the same for all accreditors, and that’s the process we’re going to navigate.
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