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Accreditation of colleges, once low key, has gotten political
By Robbie Sequeira, Stateline.org
When six Southern public university systems this summer formed a new accreditation agency, the move shook the national evaluation model that higher education has relied on for decades.
The news wasn’t unexpected: It arrived a few months after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April overhauling the nation’s accreditation system by, among other things, barring accreditors from using college diversity mandates. It also came after U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in May made it easier for universities to switch accreditors.
The accreditation process, often bureaucratic, cumbersome and time consuming, is critical to the survival of institutions of higher education. Colleges and their individual departments must undergo outside reviews — usually every few years — to prove that they meet certain educational and financial standards. If a school is not accredited, its students cannot receive federal aid such as Pell grants and student loans.
Some accreditation agencies acknowledge the process needs to evolve. But critics say the Trump administration is reshaping accreditation for political reasons, and risks undermining the legitimacy of the degrees colleges and universities award to students.
Trump said during his campaign that he would wield college accreditation as a “secret weapon” to root out DEI and other “woke” ideas from higher education. He has made good on that pledge.
Over the summer, for example, the administration sent letters to the accreditors of both Columbia and Harvard universities, alleging that the schools had violated federal civil rights law, and thus their accreditation rules, by failing to prevent the harassment of Jewish students after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel.
The administration’s antipathy toward DEI has prompted some accreditors to remove diversity requirements. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, for instance, removed diversity and inclusion language from its guiding principles earlier this year. Under White House pressure, the American Bar Association this year suspended enforcement of its DEI standards for its accreditation of law schools and has extended that suspension into next year.
But state legislatures laid the groundwork for public university accreditation changes even before Trump returned to the White House.
In 2022, Florida enacted a law requiring the state’s public institutions to switch accreditors every cycle — usually every few years — forcing them to move away from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, known as SACSCOC.
North Carolina followed suit in 2023, with a law prohibiting the 16 universities within the University of North Carolina system and the state’s community colleges from receiving accreditation from the same agency for consecutive cycles.
Then, the consortium of six Southern university systems this summer launched its new accreditation agency, called the Commission for Public Higher Education. The participating states include Florida and North Carolina, along with Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a news release that the commission will “break the ideological stronghold” that other accreditation agencies have on higher education. Speaking at Florida Atlantic University, he said the new organization will “upend the monopoly of the woke accreditation cartels.”
“We care about student achievement; we care about measurable outcomes; we care about efficiency; we care about pursuing truth; we care about preparing our students to be citizens of our republic,” DeSantis said.
Jan Friis, senior vice president for government affairs at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which represents accrediting agencies, said the century-old system is in the midst of its most significant changes since the federal government tied accreditation to student aid after World War II.
“If the student picks a school that’s not accredited by a recognized accreditor, they can’t spend any federal aid there,” Friis said. “Accreditation has become the ‘good housekeeping seal of approval.’”
What’s next for the new accreditor
Dan Harrison, who is leading the startup phase of the Commission for Public Higher Education, described accreditation as “the plumbing of the whole higher ed infrastructure.”
“It’s not dramatic. It’s not meant to be partisan. But it’s critical to how schools function,” said Harrison, who is the University of North Carolina System’s vice president for academic affairs.
Though the founding schools of the new commission are all in the South, Harrison said, he expects accreditation to shift away from the long-standing geography-based model. In the past, universities in the South were accredited by SACSCOC simply because of location. In the future, he said, public universities across the country might instead be grouped together because they share similar governance structures, funding constraints and oversight.
“In 2025, if you were designing accreditation from scratch, you wouldn’t build it around geography,” Harrison said. “Public universities have more in common with each other across states than they do with private or for-profit institutions in their own backyard.”
The Commission for Public Higher Education opened with an initial cohort capped at 10 institutions within the first six states. Harrison said that based on the interest, the group could have accepted 15 to 20.
“I thought we’d be at six or seven. We reached 10 quickly and across a wider range of institutions than expected,” he said. “We already have an applicant outside the founding systems. That’s well ahead of where I thought we would be.”
That early interest, he said, reflects frustration among public institutions around finances. In particular, public universities are mandated to undergo audits from the state, but also feel burdened by audits required by accreditors.
“Public universities already undergo multiple audits and state budget oversight,” he said. “Then accreditation requires them to do the same work again. It feels like reinventing the wheel and it pulls faculty and staff away from teaching and research.”
Harrison estimates it will take five to seven years for the new accreditor to be fully up and running, and that institutions will need to maintain dual accreditation to avoid risking Pell Grants and federal loans.
The commission is busy assembling peer review teams made up primarily of current and former public university leaders such as governing board members, system chancellors, provosts, chief financial officers, deans and faculty. In contrast to regional accreditors, which typically draw reviewers from both public and private institutions, the new commission is prioritizing reviewers from public universities.
“Ultimately, we want to be a true nationwide accreditor,” Harrison said. “Not a regional one. Not a partisan one. Just one that is organized around sector and peer expertise.”
While the creation of a public university accreditor is new, the concept of sector-specific accreditation exists in other parts of higher education, including for two-year colleges.
Mac Powell, president of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, said that tailoring accreditation to a sector can make the peer-review model more meaningful, because reviewers can identify with similar challenges. He said reviewers have been moving away from measuring resources and bureaucratic compliance toward assessing what students actually get out of their education.
“The big shift was moving from counting inputs to asking, ‘Did students actually learn what we said they would learn?’” said Powell, whose organization accredits 138 colleges across Arizona, California, New York and the Pacific.
The most important metric all accreditation models should value is how they transition their students into the workforce, he said.
“Every accreditor today is paying much more attention to retention, persistence, transfer, career outcomes and return on investment,” Powell said. “It’s becoming less about how many books are in the library and more about whether students can find a pathway to the middle class.”
The institution evolves
Stephen Pruitt is in his first year as the president of SACSCOC, the accreditation organization that the half-dozen Southern state university systems just left. Pruitt, a Georgia native, jokes that his “Southern accent and front-porch style” has helped him break down the importance of accreditation to just about anyone.
In simple terms, he said, accreditation is the system that makes college degrees real. But he feels he has to clarify a misconception about the role of accreditation agencies like SACSCOC.
“There’s this myth that I’m sitting in Atlanta deciding if institutions are good or not,” he said. “That’s not how American accreditation works. Your peers evaluate you. People who do the same work you do.”
At the same time, Pruitt isn’t dismissing the concerns that prompted states such as Florida and North Carolina to explore alternatives to SACSCOC. According to Pruitt, institutions have long raised concerns about slow turnaround times, redundant paperwork and standards that have not always adapted quickly to the evolving landscape in higher education.
“Some of the frustration is real. Institutions want less redundancy and more responsiveness. Competition isn’t something we’re afraid of,” he said. “We’re doing a full audit of our processes. We have to be more contemporary. Faster approvals, more flexibility, more transparency. Accreditation shouldn’t just be the stick. It should be the carrot too.”
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