What’s New
The Education Department announced Thursday that it is streamlining the process through which colleges can move from one accreditor to another, even for some colleges that are at risk of losing accreditation from their current accreditor.
In a news release, the department also said it is moving forward with accepting and reviewing applications for recognition from new accrediting agencies. The Biden administration had put a hold on considering new accreditors because of staffing constraints.
Making it easier to change accreditors and creating new ones is a goal of one of President Trump’s recent executive orders, which disparaged accreditors as failing to uphold academic quality and forcing colleges to adopt policies promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Both changes are meant to create more of a marketplace for accreditation and spur competition among accrediting agencies that serve as the gatekeepers for more than $100 billion in federal financial aid. Colleges must be accredited by a federally recognized agency in order for their students to receive federal student loans or Pell Grants.
In the department’s news release, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the executive order and today’s guidance ensure that the department “no longer stands as a gatekeeper to block aspiring innovators from becoming new accreditors,” nor will it “unnecessarily micromanage an institution’s choice of accreditor.”
Wesley Whistle, project director for student success and affordability in the higher-education initiative at the left-leaning New America Foundation, said the changes, along with major staff cuts at the department, will make it impossible for any meaningful review when a college switches accreditors.
“This isn’t streamlining,” Whistle wrote in an email. “This is surrender.”
The Details
Details of the new approach to changing accreditors were sent to colleges in a “Dear Colleague” letter, which emphasized that colleges need more freedom to choose the accreditors that fit their needs and that the department should have a limited role in regulating those decisions.
Under the department’s new guidance, a college that wants to change to a new accrediting agency only needs to inform the department of its intention, submit documentation that shows it is in good standing with its current accreditor, and provide a “reasonable cause” for the decision.
The department will then approve the request within 30 days, unless the college has been sanctioned or lost accreditation during the previous two years.
Even within those guidelines, the department has carved out exceptions meant to give faith-based colleges, in particular, some leeway.
The department may approve a request to change accreditors even if a college has been sanctioned or had its accreditation revoked “if the prior agency did not provide the institution its due-process rights,” according to the Dear Colleague letter, or “the agency applied its standards and criteria inconsistently, or if the adverse action, probation, show cause, or suspension order was the result of an agency’s failure to respect an institution’s stated mission, including its religious mission.”
If the department does not respond to a college’s request to switch accreditors within 30 days, the letter continues, “approval will be deemed to have been granted.”
The department’s “lone interest in this matter,” the letter said, is to ensure that a college “is not switching accrediting agencies as a means of avoiding adherence to the Department’s laws and regulations.”
The Backdrop
The changes are a response both to regulatory changes that were approved during the first Trump administration, and to backlash against the accreditor that has traditionally overseen public colleges in North Carolina and Florida.
Under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the department removed the geographic boundaries of the seven major traditional accreditors as a way to allow colleges more flexibility.
Then, in 2022, Florida passed a law requiring its public colleges to move accreditation away from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, after the accrediting agency asked state officials to respond to concerns about possible political interference and conflicts of interest at the state’s two best-known universities.
The Biden administration responded to the Florida law by telling colleges that they needed approval to change accreditors and setting up a robust review process to consider institutions’ requests to do so.
But the department was taking a year in some cases to approve requests to change accreditors, said Jan Friis, senior vice president for government affairs at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, an association representing degree-granting colleges that advocates for accreditation.
Friis said the association supports giving colleges more control over choosing an accreditor, and in fact had proposed some of the changes announced today to the Trump transition team.
The Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, the association of the seven largest accreditors, issued a news release that said the administration’s announcement is in line with their own position.
“We welcomed an opportunity to reduce bureaucracy, expedite the current process, and eliminate hurdles for institutions seeking a new accreditor,” the council said, “as long as that institution is in good academic standing as required under current federal law.”
The Stakes
Until recently, the number of colleges seeking to switch accreditors has been relatively small. But it is likely to increase in coming years as public colleges in Florida and North Carolina follow through on state laws requiring them to move.
John R. Przypyszny, a lawyer who specializes in accreditation issues, said he is not at all surprised by the new guidance, in particular the attempt to speed up a process that had become too burdensome.
But a big question is whether the new guidance will be an invitation for failing colleges to seek accreditors with lower standards to escape sanctions by claiming that their current accreditors are not respecting their mission or giving them due process.
“Allowing colleges under probation or adverse action to switch if they invoke their ‘mission’ essentially gives institutions a wink and a nod,” Whistle wrote in an email.
Another possibility, Whistle said, is that the department, whose overall staff has been cut by nearly half, will not have the capacity to review colleges’ requests to change accreditation within the 30-day limit.
In addition, the new guidance only requires colleges to “submit their most recent accreditation renewal letter — nothing more,” Whistle wrote.
“That letter could be nearly a decade old,” he said, “and reveal nothing about more recent compliance concerns, investigations, or adverse actions.”
