At 10:18 a.m. Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis walked behind a podium at Florida Atlantic University to announce that the state’s university system was leading an effort to create a new accrediting agency. More than 20 minutes into the news conference, he still hadn’t mentioned accreditation.
Instead, the Republican governor spent that time laying out a long list of grievances about higher education. He described high prices and student debt, degrees that lead to low-paying jobs, and, in his view, an emphasis on progressive ideology and diversity, equity, and inclusion — and how Florida had avoided or solved those challenges.
Ultimately, DeSantis blamed much of the sector’s ills on accreditation, describing the current system as a cartel run by “juntas,” or groups of military leaders who take over countries by force. The solution, DeSantis said, is the Commission for Public Higher Education, a consortium of six public university systems that are joining in a fledgling effort to form a new accreditor.
Along with Florida, the initial collaborators are the Texas A&M University system, the University System of Georgia, the University of North Carolina system, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Tennessee system.
Other than that, Thursday’s announcement didn’t offer many specifics — including about how the organization would work, when it might be operational, and whether the campuses in participating university systems would even seek accreditation from the new commission.
The new commission “will focus on ensuring institutions provide high-quality, high-value programs, use student data to drive decisions, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the process,” Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said in a news release.
During the news conference, Rodrigues said only that staff with expertise in accreditation were working on the details and conferring with the Trump administration.
“The new entity will seek input from a variety of stakeholders from the partner university systems in order to develop standards and procedures,” a spokesperson for the University of North Carolina system wrote in an email. “There will be a board appointed and ultimately the board will vote on the adoption of standards.”
Peter Hans, president of the UNC system, first spilled news of the potential accreditor at a May meeting of the system’s Board of Governors.
Obtaining recognition from the federal government, which is required for it to serve as a gatekeeper for federal student aid, could take years. Under current regulations, a new accreditor must demonstrate its standards and processes for two years before it can be considered for recognition.
The Trump administration has issued an executive order that seeks to make it easier for institutions to change accreditors and to expedite federal approval of new accreditors. Streamlining such approval would likely require changes to Education Department regulations, but the administration has yet to announce any new rulemaking on accreditation.
DeSantis said he expects the new organization to attract a lot of support from states in the Southeast. But a system leader in one state building the new commission said Thursday that its public universities wouldn’t necessarily seek accreditation there.
In a systemwide email, Randy Boyd, president of the University of Tennessee system, wrote that the commission “would simply represent an additional accreditation option for us, and we would continue to choose the accreditor that best meets our needs.”
“While Florida is formally announcing the effort this morning,” Boyd wrote, “I wanted you to hear directly from me that the UT System is participating in ongoing conversations, not as a replacement of existing accreditation but as part of a national dialogue around innovation and accountability in higher education.”
Like President Trump, DeSantis’s antipathy towards accreditation is well known. In 2022, he championed legislation to force all public colleges in Florida to seek accreditation outside the state’s traditional accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. The accrediting body made waves when it inquired in 2021 about the presidential searches at two universities.
To comply with the law, many of Florida’s institutions are now seeking membership with the Higher Learning Commission, another of the seven major accrediting organizations.
In 2023, North Carolina lawmakers passed a similar law after the Southern Commission sent a letter to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, asking the institution to ensure that it was upholding principles of shared governance in establishing its School of Civic Life and Leadership, a Republican-backed effort focused on civil discourse.
Florida also filed a lawsuit in 2023 against the U.S. Education Department arguing that the accreditation system was unconstitutional. A federal judge dismissed the suit last year.
In both states, the discontent was over the Southern Commission’s standards on governance, but it’s not known what kinds of standards the new commission will develop.
The Higher Education Act, the federal law governing colleges that want to receive federal dollars, sets 10 areas for accreditors to oversee: student achievement; curriculum; fiscal and administrative capacity; student support services; recruiting and admissions practices; measure of program length; student complaints; and compliance with Title IV.
The federal law, however, also explicitly allows accreditors to set standards beyond the 10 required elements. For example, five of the nation’s seven traditional accrediting agencies have standards requiring colleges to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, though not the Southern Commission, which now accredits colleges primarily in the Southeast.
The Higher Learning Commission recently removed several references to diversity, equity, and inclusion from its standards. The accreditor overseeing colleges primarily in California and Hawaii also has recently suspended their standards for DEI.
But the plan to create a new accreditor could be Florida’s attempt to avoid accountability altogether, said Antoinette Flores, director of higher education accountability and quality in the Higher Education initiative at New America.
If Florida is allowed to accredit its own public colleges, Flores said in an email, it will give elected officials full control of the institutions, without any safeguards against political interference or conflict of interest.
“DeSantis wants to get rid of the accreditation cartel,” Flores wrote, “by creating his own cartel.”
