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The order was the latest gambit in Trump’s aggressive attacks on racial-justice initiatives throughout society. Notably, this was not the first time he trained attention on accreditation. In a 2023 campaign video, then-candidate Trump harangued: “The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left.” He characterized accreditation as “our secret weapon.” The executive order is part of that promised weaponization — the politicizing of a system that is designed to be buffered from politics.
To illustrate the claimed abuse, Trump calls out the American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, the primary accreditor of law schools. Trump also castigates the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the primary accreditor of doctor of medicine programs, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the sole accreditor for allopathic and osteopathic medical residency and fellowship programs.
The president’s ire has risen from accreditation standards issued by each body directing schools to make attempts at fostering diverse learning environments. While the Liaison Committee’s medical-school standards define diversity vaguely as the inclusion of “persons from different backgrounds and with differing life experiences,” the Council’s law-school standards are more usefully explicit. They embed diversity in the context of “gender, race, and ethnicity” and place emphasis on “racial and ethnic minorities.” The graduate medical-education standards plow a mushy middle ground, referencing “individuals underrepresented in medicine and medical leadership.”
While Trump drapes the executive order in legitimate concerns about the costs and value of higher education, he picks the wrong exemplars.
The order’s lumping of these accreditors together in what has become a trademark shaming and intimidation ritual is telling. For starters, the standards in question are not synonymous. As explained above, each set is substantively different from the others. The law-school standards are the only ones that even invoke notions of racial justice. And while Trump drapes the executive order in legitimate concerns about the costs and value of higher education, he picks the wrong exemplars.
One would be hard pressed to make a reasonable argument that a medical degree is a bad or exploitative investment. Legal education is a more common target of this charge, but barring roughly five years following the Great Recession, the law degree has been a reliable path to stable employment and decent pay. Data for the graduating class of 2023 showed record highs in employment rate (93 percent), median salary ($90,000), and the percentage of new graduates securing employment prior to graduation (74 percent). Both degrees are expensive, with graduates typically leaving school with debt well over $100,000. These debt levels impose hardships on some; but the order fails to make any coherent connection between diversity-focused accreditation standards and excessive debt — or any other ills facing higher education.
The meeting opened with Ted Mitchell, then-under secretary of education, discussing the need for some accrediting agencies to “up their game.” Mitchell asserted that the “only way to ensure that the system works” is to focus on institutional outcomes. Mitchell was parroting a central Obama administration policy priority. Outcomes were a predominant focus of the administration across the education ecosystem, from early childhood through higher education. A few years earlier, the Department of Education released its College Scorecard, which was championed as “part of President Obama’s continued efforts to hold colleges accountable for cost, value, and quality.”
At the NACIQI meeting, Council leadership was questioned regarding its seeming reluctance to tie law-school accreditation to outcomes. Legal education was working its way through an intense period of difficulty. Employment rates and salaries for new graduates had fallen to levels unseen in more than a decade. There were simply too many graduates for the post-recession job market to absorb. The Council was broadly blamed for encouraging the glut through purportedly lax oversight. In the end, the Council’s accrediting authority was renewed, but the pressure brought by federal officials and others led the Council to adopt new standards aimed at shoring up lapses. One of the new standards added nuance and transparency to the graduate-employment data reported and published by schools; another set a more tangible institutional bar-passage requirement. Accreditor oversight was not weaponized against law schools; it was used to better protect students.
When thinking about the accrediting system, one should not overstate the power of the federal government to impose its will. The influence of accreditors is enhanced by federal recognition, but it does not flow from that recognition. The process of institutional self-study and external peer review that we now call accreditation existed long before the federal government began deputizing accreditors. Law and medicine are both self-regulating guilds. Accreditation in those contexts is premised on members of the profession dictating the form, function, and substance of requisite training.
Much is made of the existential role accreditors play in influencing which institutions are eligible to collect federal financial aid from students. The executive order calls accreditors “gatekeepers” of the nation’s financial-aid system. But this characterization has only tangential application to the agencies the order cites. As programmatic accreditors, the Council and the Liaison Committee do not typically determine a school’s financial-aid eligibility. Law and medical schools must generally secure regional or national accreditation, typically as part of their universities, to gain access to financial-aid funds.
When thinking about the accrediting system, one should not overstate the power of the federal government to impose its will.
The influence of law- and medical-school accreditors stems from their broad acceptance as the organizational embodiments of their guilds. This acceptance has been hardened over more than a century of cultivating interest alignment between schools, consumers (potential and actual students), and state-level regulators. The founding of the American Medical Association in 1847 was motivated by concern among elites about the explosion of people practicing medicine and the proliferation of low-resource medical schools. AMA leadership pushed for stricter requirements of medical-school admission, a longer period of prescribed study, and a licensing exam. These reforms eventually became the model for medical education and licensing in the United States through an intensifying feedback loop of schools adopting the stricter admission and curricular model, consumers seeking out such schools, and regulators aligning licensing requirements to the new model.
By the early 20th century, the AMA, with no formal authority, came to possess the type of existential power that is often associated with accreditors today. In 1905, the AMA developed a school rating system, the distribution of which was said to cause “a great wave of improvement in medical education.” Between 1905 and 1927, the number of medical schools declined by half, with the number of schools receiving the AMA’s least favorable ratings falling by almost 90 percent. Some of them improved to higher ratings, but many shut down.
The AMA had accumulated power over institutional life and death. Its methods became the basis of the contemporary system of professional-school accreditation, with the Liaison Committee being a direct outgrowth. The Council’s law-school oversight followed a similar evolution. Federal recognition decades later was not a cause of their prominence — it was an effect. And therefore the threat of rescinding the federal recognition of these professional school accreditors is more menacing than the likely impacts of such action.
Lurking in two prominent states, however, is a real threat. The supreme courts of Florida and Texas are reconsidering their rules limiting bar admission only to graduates of law schools approved by the ABA Council. The Florida court cited “reasonable questions” about the Council’s diversity-accreditation standard as well as the larger ABA’s “active political engagement.” The Texas court was demure regarding its motivations, but the general sense is that it shares common mind with Florida.
The Council’s conception of a sound legal education is by no means sacrosanct — its wisdom is regularly and rightly questioned. Moreover, periodic review of bar-admission requirements should be standard practice everywhere. But when such reviews are weaponized for political aims, as these appear to be, the primary losers are law students and graduates. Currently, all jurisdictions recognize Council accreditation for purposes of bar admission; 46 limit admission only to graduates of Council-approved schools. A decision by a jurisdiction to rescind Council recognition would do immense disservice to students and graduates. No longer would their law degree be recognized nationwide, limiting its mobility and negatively impacting its value and return on investment. Worst case, the jurisdictional comity that is rooted in the “united” recognition of the Council as a reliable, albeit imperfect, watchdog will be replaced by a paradigm of Balkanization. In this scenario, accreditation would be a destructive weapon.
