The College Accreditation Makeover

The typically sedate college accreditation process is a battleground in America’s higher education culture war. That’s because accreditation isn’t just a gold seal on a college website. It’s the switch that turns federal student aid on and off.

Lose it, and the spigot of Pell Grants and federal student loans can close. For many institutions, especially those serving high-need students, that’s an existential problem. So in practice, accreditation functions as one of the most powerful levers in American higher education.

That’s why a process Americans rarely know anything about has become a consequential policy fight in higher education. The gatekeeper to federal money has stepped into the spotlight, pulled there by politics, a growing insistence on measurable outcomes, and a federal approach that treats accreditation less like a closed guild and more like a marketplace.

From Low-Key to High-Stakes Politics

Accreditation is typically a once-a-decade quality assurance process. It’s regional, peer-driven, and largely invisible. The bargain is straightforward. Private nonprofit accreditors recognized by the U.S. Department of Education set minimum standards, and the federal government provides aid only to institutions that pass through that gate.

Everyone speaks in the dialect of higher education—continuous improvement, mission alignment, student learning outcomes. Months later, a letter arrives at the college, and life goes on. Except now, accreditation doesn’t feel like a letter. It feels like a lever. And that bargain is being rewritten.

A major inflection point came on April 23, 2025, when President Trump signed an executive order titled “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education”, paired with a White House fact sheet that framed accreditation as a barrier to accountability and innovation. The order pressed the Education Department to encourage new accreditors, make it easier for institutions to switch accreditors, and push the system toward transparency and outcomes, while also invoking academic freedom and viewpoint diversity.

The administration didn’t stop at rhetoric. In June 2025, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights notified Columbia University’s accreditor that Columbia allegedly violated portions of the Higher Education Act, thereby failing to meet accreditation standards.

The executive order also directed the Department of Education to evaluate whether the American Bar Association should retain its federally recognized role as a law-school accreditor due to “unlawful ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ requirements.” The message was unmistakable. Accreditation is not only quality assurance. It’s leverage.

Finally, the U.S. Department of Education recently announced the dates for two one-week public sessions in April and May devoted to considering new federal rules for accreditation. This announcement includes an invitation to the public to nominate individuals for membership on The Accreditation and Modernization (AIM) Committee who are “willing to challenge the status quo to help reform this unhealthy system,” says Nicholas Kent, U.S. Undersecretary of Education.

Meanwhile, the broader story of federal pressure on universities has intensified. A Washington Post story describes an “unprecedented drive for control” using funding constraints and policy demands to force institutional change, including proposals that accreditors prioritize “intellectual diversity” as part of academic freedom and student learning.

In other words, accreditation has become attractive to policymakers because it offers a way to move institutions without rewriting the whole higher-ed rulebook. When aid eligibility is at stake, a request can feel like a mandate.

The Revolt About Outcomes

Politics may have made accreditation famous. But another rebellion has been growing for years. The demand that higher education prove its value in ways students can understand.

Ask families what quality in higher education means, and they won’t talk about governance structures or library holdings. They’ll ask: Will my kid graduate? Will she get a job? Will the debt be worth it?

Traditional accreditation has often emphasized inputs and process compliance. Reformers across the spectrum, often for different reasons, want more attention to outcomes: student completion rates, debt, loan repayment, licensure passage, job placement, earnings, and mobility.

Some accreditors have moved in that direction already. The WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) launched a public Key Indicators Dashboard in 2021 and has expanded outcomes transparency, including program-level return on investment metrics and a new Data Narrative feature that translates complex metrics into more accessible charts. WSCUC has also accredited nontraditional models, including OpenClassrooms’ apprenticeship-degree approach, signaling that at least some incumbents can adapt.

All this makes the federal government’s next move even more striking.

The Federal Bet for a New Marketplace of Accreditors

In early January, the Department of Education awarded $14.5 million through its Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education to 15 projects meant to promote accreditation reform and help create alternatives. The money includes five grants to institutions seeking to change accreditors and ten grants to organizations building new accreditation programs.

Examples of these would-be accreditors send a clear message about their difference from many current accreditors. The Competency-Based Education Network is building “QualSurance,” focused on verified skills and employer-validated competencies. The Online Learning Consortium is creating an accreditor for digital learning programs. The University of Texas at Austin is building a National Accreditation System for Teacher Readiness and Applied Fields for STEM teacher readiness and applied fields. Valley Forge Military College is developing an accreditor for military-aligned programs. The University of Rochester is partnering with the Inclusive Higher Education Accreditation Council to accredit certificate programs serving students with intellectual disabilities. And the Postsecondary Commission, currently piloting its approach with Texas State Technical College, aims to pursue federal recognition and become a Title IV gatekeeper by 2028.

A striking part of the grant list is the bet on technology. Several projects envision streamlined data submission, automated evidence review, and ongoing monitoring rather than narrative self-studies and massive evidence portfolios. One group in Virginia is building an “AI-native” accrediting model for short-term workforce programs, aiming to reduce timelines to under nine months while centering outcomes like completion, licensure passage, job placement, and wages. Another project proposes a public outcomes dashboard, 90-day accreditation decisions, and numeric thresholds for placement and completion.

The message is clear. If accreditation is slow, monolithic, and process-heavy, create new accreditors that are faster, narrower, more outcomes-driven, and more technologically enabled. The pitch is not that AI makes accreditation decisions. It is that AI reduces paperwork, flags missing information, and synthesizes evidence so human evaluators can focus on quality judgments.

All this raises a question that will define the next decade. Are we building a smarter oversight system or just a faster one?

Reforming the Gatekeeper

Creating new accreditors needs guardrails. Otherwise, competition becomes fragmented, and speed becomes a race to the bottom. Here are six principles policymakers should consider, whether they are drafting federal recognition rules, monitoring FIPSE-funded experiments, or redesigning the accreditation system itself:

• Put outcomes at the center, but don’t reduce quality only to wages. Require transparent reporting on completion, debt, loan repayment, and employment outcomes where appropriate. But use risk adjustment and subgroup reporting so institutions serving harder-to-serve students are not punished for doing the work society needs.
• Move from episodic theater to continuous monitoring. The strongest case for technology is earlier detection of risk—financial instability, drops in completion, spikes in borrower distress—before students are harmed and before taxpayers absorb losses.
• Encourage competition without rewarding accreditor shopping. New accreditors should be welcomed only if federal recognition standards remain tough and transparent—and if accreditors that repeatedly fail to protect students face consequences. Competition works only when the floor is real.
• Automate paperwork, not judgment. AI can reduce burden and improve clarity, but accreditation decisions should remain human, auditable, and explainable. Any automated evidence review should be transparent and subject to oversight.
• Don’t fragment oversight in ways that confuse students. Specialization may sharpen standards, but too much specialization can create a maze of overlapping stamps. Policymakers should prioritize consumer clarity and comparability, not just institutional convenience.
• Protect legitimacy by keeping accreditation from becoming a partisan cudgel. Accreditation works only if it is trusted. If it becomes widely perceived as ideological enforcement—right or left—the system’s legitimacy collapses, and the federal-aid bargain collapses with it.

Accreditation may well decide, more than any presidential speech, which institutions survive, which new providers emerge, and whether the next generation experiences higher education as a ladder rather than an expensive detour.

The federal government’s $14.5 million push is small compared with the tens of billions of dollars in student aid that flows through accreditation’s gatekeeping function each year. But that small amount signals a profound shift. Washington is no longer merely supervising the gatekeeper. It is trying to redesign the gate itself, adding new doors, new locks, and new people holding the keys.